Sincere question: why is "rapidness of reporting" so important that we'd trade away other important goals?
(Within reasonable limits, I mean.)
(Within reasonable limits, I mean.)
We close the polls at 1900 and have a Collector Officer run one copy of the data on a thumb drive to the County.
The Chief gets to deliver a backup a couple hours later.
Hand-counting the ballots instead of scanning would be expensive in terms of time and money, and error-prone.
I'd argue that Fairfax County, VA is about optimal, all factors considered.
As I'm fond of saying: "Virginia is for lovers...of elections."
Why?
It's not that expensive - what price democracy? And in terms of error rate - if there is a very close vote, in the UK they just do a recount - sometimes more than once - the variation between recounts is very very small - single digit ( votes not percent ) at most.
to be fair, I guess one difference between the US and the UK is the distributed nature of the vote - in the UK it's broken up into constituencies of ~70K voters - so any recount is scoped to that ( ~ 50K actual votes ).
For a non-trivial amount of ballots, the overhead of securely managing the ballots is substantial. You're casually driving up staffing costs all over the place, and legal challenges will ensue if everything is less than meticulous.
To your point, though, Virginia blows a great deal of money on elections. Check out all 19" of our local glory: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/elections/sites/elections/file...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/costs-of-the-2019...
So ~3 pounds per registered voter.
I'd say that's good value - I find US data harder to find- but I see estimates in the region of $10 per voter.
There are elections in India and the US to control billions of people and some very aggressive military people armed with weapons capable of ending modern civilisation. This is one of the most fundamental social technologies we have to keep the whole system stable (up there with limited liability corporations and courts). The downside of one of those elections failing because of voting machine trickery is stupendous.
Frankly, I'm not sure even auditability is that important as a design goal compared to voter security. If the election is close enough that an audit matters the two candidates are pretty similar. In practice, if there is any meaningful gap in preferences then the outcome of the election should be clear enough that an audit isn't that meaningful. It's nice to have and it is cheap enough to include in a paper ballot.
Because it is a low-frequency, high-importance activity that uses public facilities.