With electronic voting, the bar for being able to validate vote counts is raised to requiring computer experts who understand public-key encryption.
With paper ballots, anyone who can count is able to validate votes.
Electronic voting would be prime for obfuscated attempts at influencing elections because only a handful of people would be able to verify that the machines counted votes correctly.
They aren't inefficient. In the UK (paper ballots) an accurate estimate is available when the polls close, and a certain result is available within a few hours before next morning. This is much faster than US voting machines.
1. You didn't have to count 151 million votes in the UK election
2. You didn't have to wait a few days for mail-in ballots that were delayed in transit to arrive
3. You didn't have to do this in the middle of a global pandemic that required poll workers to stay 6 feet apart
Generally the US election results can be predicted the same day, this year had additional challenges due to extremely high turn-out, high use of mail-in ballots, and limited number of pool workers due to pandemic.
In my opinion, elections should be done using paper ballots, and those ballots are counted using electronic tabulation machines. After a batch of ballots are counted, a random sample of them are selected and manually counted. Should the results match, then you can have a high certainty of the accuracy of the count. Electronic tabulation machines are actually more accurate than hand-counting, and by hand counting again, you reduce the risk of the machines making "mistakes" due to technical glitches or malicious backdoors etc.
[Edited to add: 46 states have a lower population density than the UK, adding further logistical consideration]
If each community counts their votes... why does it matter how large an area they collectively cover?
St Ives constituency in the UK is generally the last to declare, presumably because the island populations are so small and remote it's considered unsafe for them to individually count and report the results for collation, for multiple potential reasons (Gugh: 3 residents)
Why is it about the US that means it takes a week... even with these machines which supposedly make it better?
If your count in the UK doesn't finish for a week, the parliamentary session opens, and you don't have local representation in parliament. There's an immediate procedural consequence that disadvantages the local area and may result in concentrated unrest.
If your count in the US doesn't finish, the relevant [Congressional] term doesn't start until January 3rd, 2021. As such, there's no immediately comparable procedural consequence.
The Electoral College doesn't cast its votes until December 14th.
The Supreme Court won't get involved, to hurry you up, until December 8th.
Correctly postmarked ballots will (in some states) still be counted if they arrive late, up to November 23rd.
Today is still November 15th. In theory, not all the votes have even arrived to be counted yet.
The US is vast. The political geography is different because the physical geography is different.
In US there were some laws that counting couldn't start before polls are closed. Despite mail in ballots arriving a month earlier. In some places they weren't even allowed to prepare them for counting (like verifying signatures and removing ballots from envelopes).
This is a good time to remind everyone that in the U.S. there are many different voting jurisdictions, and at the very least 50 different sets of rules. Some similar, some not. So it's difficult to generalize, some places count early, some not, some allow late arrivals, some not, etc.
That's actually pretty much on par for much of the U.S. We have paper ballots and results mostly finished before the next morning. There are stragglers, of course, for good reasons, but you don't really hear much about those unless they are possibly going to decide the election, like this year.
And then of course 2020 is it's own special kind of fun, not typical of any other year.
This year, my ballot had about a dozen individual races (including two state referendums and an advisory question) to vote on, and this is probably about or below the US median ballot complexity each presidential election.
But can you not return a presidential result in the first few hours, and then go back in priority order?
All these phishing schemes that are extremely effective with IT workers and other security conscious people. I say just keep elections analog for the time being. Perhaps someday the technology will be mature, well understood, and distributed far enough to work but I don't see it happening this decade.
I agree with this - in addition, it makes it a lot easier for everyone to understand the system, and therefore more likely to trust it.
Is this the USA system we are talking about? Because a significant proportion don’t seem to understand or trust the system right now!
I would be happy if we could have a national popular vote to choose the president, that reduces complexity. I'm wary of anything more, though I do like that there are now some experiments here and there with other systems.
Edit: I've recently come to the conclusion that the real value of elections is as a national show of force.
"1xx,000,000 of us are here and paying attention and expecting the government to respond to our interests and willing to do something about it"
I'm extremely confused by this statement. All the systems the parent is talking about still use plurality. Substituting in another voting method doesn't change the fact that each state works slightly differently (and really every county).
I'd also say that if this was your goal then you'd want something besides plurality. RCV/IRV would probably be good because it is highly inefficient because you have to do many different rounds whereas systems like plurality and condorcet (exception to STAR, which has 2 rounds) are single round methods.
I should mention Ireland and Australia does hand counting with IRV (Australia has had IRV for 100+ years). I don't think the hand counting is really a major factor, though I will still contend that ordinal systems are needlessly complicated when we have cardinal systems available to us (which also give higher fidelity).
As for part more information Clay (who might be in this thread somewhere?) put out a pretty good video on voting methods and towards the end he shows a sample of an Oakland Mayoral result that used IRV[0] (around 15:20). It isn't too useful in isolation but I do encourage watching the whole thing because it is from someone who is a HN member and an expert on voting.