Hand-counting is slow and inaccurate. As in, you regularly see swings of 1% or more from hand-counts, and they typically take weeks.

Electronic tabulation of paper ballots is the best of both worlds. You get results today, they're pretty accurate, and there's a paper trail if you want to go back and argue later.

Hand-counting is done in public in any respectable democracy. Each ballot is shown and you can constantly see the current tally. My parents used to take me to our polling places tally when I was a kid. For a mistake to happen, thirty persons supporting different candidates would have had to be wrong at the same time. It seems very unlikely to me.

Also, my country manages to hand count 30,000,000 ballots in less than two days and we get a very accurate result prediction on the day of the vote using a sample of official results from small polling places known to be representative.

Hand counting is not a problem at all when implemented properly.

At least in German we get the first hand count within hours. If that result is close and a recount is done, we will usually get that within a day. The final result may be weeks away, but that is because legal proceedings and additional scrutiny in a hand full of the 70000 voting locations take some time. Doing the vote with a sufficient number of locations and polling clerks is not cheap, about one euro per voter, but worth it to us.

Why is speed so prioritized?

I’d prefer accurate >> speed when it comes down to something as important as an governmental election.

Accurate, triple-redundant hand counts can be done quickly - like in a day. Spot rechecks and audits may add another week.

The UK counts all their votes by hand. Overnight.

Out of curiosity, what does a UK ballot look like? I found [1], is that typical?

Part of the problem might be one of ballot design. A US ballot is typically considerably more complicated than that. Here's one from New York [2]. There will be many races; in a presidential election there will be president, usually senator, representative, governor, state senator, local councilman, and assorted other offices. At least in New York State, the candidates will be presented by party, so a single candidate may be on the ballot multiple times.

Nobody is counting the US one by hand overnight; not without some pretty comprehensive redesigns of the ballot.

[1] https://www.gravesham.gov.uk/home/elections-and-voting/guide...

[2] http://www.otsegocounty.com/depts/boe/images/WO.jpg

That's one of the simpler UK ballots. Some of our council elections allow us to elect more than one candidate, and our mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections uses the rather oddball supplementary vote system.

> http://www.otsegocounty.com/depts/boe/images/WO.jpg

This is insane.

The Democrats ran in 4 "parties", and the Republicans in 3 "parties", for governor. The Libertarian party nominated 2 separate sets of governor/deputy governor.

The non main parties nominated the same people (sometimes), but not for some categories, randomly. Some people are nominated on different parties that nominate different people for governor.

Ultimately, it's a 2-person race in most posts, and a single nomination for coroner. Why not have 14 simple ballots with a straight choice?

Australia also counts all the votes by hand. In most cases the results for the lower house are known before the day is over, so like the UK we are pretty good at counting votes.

The same people also do the upper house count, which usually elects 1/4 the number of people in the lower house. Very roughly, the results are usually know in a month or so. https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/senate_count.htm

If the results were recorded electronically I guess a computer would spit out the final outcome within a few minutes of the ballot box closing.

And you don't want to be on the roads right after the polls close and they race each other to get the ballot boxes into the counter centres.

More importantly, yes you can rig a paper ballot, but you can't do it large scale without everybody knowing it.

Well, kinda.

In the UK state-level interference would likely go unnoticed if it mugged only postal votes and didn't push too obviously-far in one direction or another. I've been on the receiving end of mail interference and since then I can only assume it's become a lot cheaper to do than it was.

But it is really slow in comparison to lets say Germany or Austria where 80%+ votes are counted after 2 hours.

Ballot stuffing is a thing, and ballot disposal is a thing.

Elections are one of the few games in town where the people that control things get to count up the vote and tell you who should control things in the future. If government was really ethical, you would expect independent auditors to be checking processes before and after.

Vote counting, in properly-ran systems, is done by paid contractors, and observed by representatives of both parties.

"Both parties"?

Generally, there's an incumbent, and a likely winner. If you have enough popular support to win a fair election, you can probably figure out how to mobilize a few volunteers to oversee ballot counting.

I think the general assumption that you have is that all voters have equal access to financial gain, free time, and other things that in any society known are heavily deviated towards the rich. Add to that the fact that the most heavily monied campaigns normally turn out to be the winners, and it becomes very difficult to claim the idea of fair elections has any real merit except as a nice theory we want to believe is true.

I'd wager there's only really two parties with enough volunteers to actually put election monitors in every precinct

You shouldn't presume the U.S. two-party system to be the normal case.

Also as a party you don't need to monitor every precinct. You monitor those where you suspect fraud might happen. Then every voter should be able to monitor the counting process if they desire. Why should they have to rely on parties to do it for them?

Pretty sure paid contractors are not necessary, citizen will usually count for free.

> Why don't paper ballots suffice?

Hand counting is costly, time-consuming and error-prone. Paper ballots with supervised electronic tabulation puts forward the best of both worlds. (It's how we do it in New York, too.)

More people involved and from more diverse backgrounds into hand counting then less likely conspiracy theories would be able to take a hold.

Democracy doesn't work without trust. Sacrificing trust for some speed is dumb thing to do.

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