We use paper in Australia and generally have a result by the next day (2010 being an exception due to hung parliament). We also have a very strict chain of ownership and auditible vote counts ledgers, if they're really looking for anti-fraud measures they could come and observe our AEC

In the U.S. each state runs their own part of the federal election.

In Canada, federal elections are run by Elections Canada, which is a non-partisan independent agency. It's responsible for both defining ridings (to avoid gerrymandering) and running the elections themselves.

I'm probably biased as a Canadian, but I have a lot more confidence in our approach than the U.S.'s. After this, even more so.

Don't the vast majority of states use paper ballots? I don't know of any regular citizen that wouldn't agree.

Paper is great, paper is scalable. It's also easy to understand.

You're right, there is absolutely no reason to use voting machines. Elections in other countries work perfectly fine with paper ballots.

IIR, the US's huge push to (computerized) machine voting was after the 2000 election, when Florida's Democrats demonstrated just how badly they could screw up with paper ballots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

And of course, the magic cure for "we f*cked up at the simple job of doing X" is always "let's try to do something far more complex than X instead".

Other countries tend to have only one or two contests, which makes counting easier. In the US, it's very common to have 10s of contests on a ballot, and it's much more efficient to count via optical scan. You can still have high confidence in this case if you do a risk-limiting audit.

> In the US, it's very common to have 10s of contests on a ballot, and it's much more efficient to count via optical scan.

Then hire 100x the number of poll workers as are needed in other countries. The cost is still trivial relative to the importance.

Ha, you want America to focus on quality over cheaping out the working class.