The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.
Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:
> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.
> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.
I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.
Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.
I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.
I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.
Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.
There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.
So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.
Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.
[1] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[2] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/19/spoilt-ballots-pc...
[4] https://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/Klinkner%20Analysis.pd...
Or maybe you didn't read the study....
On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.
In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.
This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).