Australia hand-counts. In a federal election, a voter will typically cast a preferential vote for the lower house, and a more complicated proportional vote for 3 senate seats. Rarely, they'll vote on 1 or 2 propositions ("referenda"). This seems comparable to a federal US ballot (first-past-the-post votes for house/senate/president).

The US casts 10 times as many votes - so it seems reasonable for the US to hire 10 times as many poll workers? Hand-counting is O(n) i.e. constant per-capita, and it scales horizontally.

Local and state ballots in the US can feature tens of elected positions and propositions, I could imagine hand-counting them to be quite expensive.

A single polling station usually only has a few thousand voters. During the day, polling officers at the station processed (signed/stamped/tore/etc) every single ballot that went into the boxes. They also verified every person's ID. When polling closes, why is it enormous human labor to count the votes, but all the processing during the day is not?

> The cost of human labor to count all ballots by hand will be enormous

In Taiwan, this is how it's done. Every ballot is counted by human. It's completely public: you can just walk in any polling station during the counting process and watch they count.

Same in Spain. In fact if any count is challenged, the electoral authorities hold public recounts of the ballots a couple of days after the election

Chile has a very good election system and there's basically no machine input in the process.

What's important is being able to segment the population in enough voting places so that each voting place is maneaganle just by a small number of people. The Chilean system is scalable because you can always just add more voting places as the population grows.

Usually these voting places are civic centres, stadiums, schools.

It's a good system and generally for a presidential election we get the results in about 4 hours after voting ends.

I'm much less concerned about automated vote counters, as long as they are not connected to the Internet, enough ballots are hand-reviewed to make sure that the values from the machine don't seem way off, and the specific type of counting machine isn't uniform across the whole election.

If your paper ballot are counted by simple, airgapped machines - that's both a vastly reduced attack surface, and is easy (if laborious) to physically audit.

The cost of human labor? Maybe US-exceptionalism is peeking through?

In actually democratic countries the elections are done on holidays(Sunday) and the polling stations are in where you live.

It is your vote you silly. It is your democratic duty, right and responsibility to guard it if you don't trust the observers by becoming one. Everybody should be able to watch the process and the count!

Losing one day of revenue would not hurt. Especially on a holiday.