Electronic ballot-tallying machines are necessary to running accurate and speedy elections. As we saw in the Arizona fiasco with the "Cyber Ninjas," hand-counting ballots takes weeks, if not months. Additionally, hand-counting has an error margin of 1-2%. In a era where many races are within a point or two, hand-counting ballots will lead to the wrong person winning office.
We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.
I disagree. While I do agree that hand counting paper ballots is extremely time consuming and error prone, it's not the only alternative to an electronic voting machine. The other alternative is a mechanical voting machine. No electronics and no software involved. I grew up in south Louisiana and this is the kind of voting machine that was used when my parents went to vote. The downside is that the machines were big and heavy. The voter steps inside the curtains and pulls a big lever that closes the curtains behind them and makes the machine ready for voting. The voter physically moves a lever for each choice. When they're done voting, they pull the big lever in opposite direction and it tallies their votes, returns the levers to their original positions, and opens the curtains. I don't know the exact procedure of reporting the polling station results, but I'm sure it required multiple individuals (and maybe even a supervisor) to read off the results from each voting machine. Even if you have a polling station with say 20 voting machines, that's just 20 additions per voting choice that must be summed. This is much easier and faster than hand counting paper ballots. Additionally, I think it would be nearly impossible to alter the voting machines in an attempt to steal votes. I would like to see this everywhere. Voting integrity and quick results.
What I had in mind when thinking about mechanical voting machines would have been punched cards and 19th century style machines for sorting and counting.
How many races are on your ballot? Next Tuesday, I'll have 11 races to vote for, plus 4 ballot referendums. That's probably a median election ballot in the US.
In the UK? Typically just one race: you vote to elect your local MP.
You might also vote for someone to represent you in the devolved Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish governments if you live in those countries, but that's only 15% of the population and those elections aren't necessarily on the same day as the general election.
In the UK you usually have 1-3, fewer since we left the EU.
However, the number of ballots is relatively immaterial for two reasons:
Spend: In the UK, price of counting ballots is far lower than price of paying poll booth staff. It costs approximately £0.10 per person (note, not per ballot) in the UK to count ballots in a nationwide election (as opposed to about £0.35 on keeping polling booths open). It’s likely that if the number of ballots went up by a factor of 10, further efficiencies would be found, but simple ‘ballots counted per hour’ metrics imply that the marginal cost should be relatively affordable.
Difficulty: While running a fair and free election is undeniably challenging, it naively would appear to be much less work than E.g. the USPS does each day to deliver the daily 300M pieces of mail.
While the USPS is a government department, it is allowed to charge its users and does so.
The people running elections don't charge voters for voting.
So I'm not sure it's useful to compare the two?
(That the Americans feel like they need government mail when the supposedly more socialist Europeans mostly managed to privatise their former monopolists probably tells us.. something?)
Nope. The people running the election sign every voter in uaing a system independent of the voting machine (often paper). At the end of the day, they know that 216 people voted at that precinct. If the counting machine doesn't say 216 votes on it, something is awry and must be investigated.
We also have tons of checks in place to make sure the machines work. There are calibration runs where known stacks of votes are sent through the machines and confirmed at the end. The vote totals on the machines are checked against the number of people who voted. Post-election, election officials randomly choose machines, open them up in front of the public at preannounced times, and confirm that the ballots that have been locked inside the machine match the tally the machine produced.