The problem with hand counting is that it scales very poorly. Specifically, the cost of hand counting is the product of the number of ballots times the number of contests on each ballot. US elections tend to have a very large number of contests, which makes the counting very slow. [0] Even with the California 1% manual tally this can take weeks [1] It's true that most of the world does hand counting, but most of the world has one or two contests. It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot, which obviously takes 20x as long.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
Well said. Not everything in life is improved by larger scale and efficiency. Certain concerns like counting votes require accuracy and trust in the process, because distrust in the voting process is detrimental to the whole idea of a representative republic.
> It's not unusual for a US election to have 20+ contests on the ballot
This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.
It's admittedly a bit difficult because we vote for so many things. President and VP, 2 senate, 2 representatives, then any number of state congressmen(mmost states have their own "senators" but operating within that state only), several district attorneys, mayor, comptroller, and state judges. Even your school board in your district is on the ballot. And lastly, any number of propositions to vote.
It's a big reason I vote from home. Properly researching every candidate on a ballot can legitimately be a full day's work. Spreading that out to a week of iteration helps a lot.
I should not have to vote on judges and dog catchers and stuff. I like officials being accountable, but voting for an unopposed “nonpartisan” candidate has negative value - it wastes time and resources and lends legitimacy to an essentially non democratic process with uninformed voting. Better to have an easy recall mechanism.
At the very least, put the federal stuff on a federal ballot, the state stuff on a state ballot, and the local stuff on a local ballot, and have them 4 months apart. Then we can get back to hand counting and election night results.
A more scalable approach is to use paper ballots with optical scan followed by a risk-limiting audit [2]. This still provides software independence, but at a much lower cost.
The following blog series on why voting is hard goes into this in more detail: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting1/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-opscan/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-vbm/, https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-dre/
[0] https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/voting-hcpb/#scalability
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/evt08/tech/full_papers/...
[2] https://verifiedvoting.org/audits/whatisrla/