that we got the lever machines in. Then the lever machines wore out so we got electronic machines.
Granted that electronics do wear out in their own time, but it's fascinating how many are complaining about how bad they on their iPhones just after getting some money from a cash machine and using computerized checkout equipment for stuff they don't order on Amazon. Computers just can't do anything right.
Anyway, admittedly it's ridiculous to run a Windows-based proprietary system to simply count stuff. Computers were counting stuff long before Windows and it's what they do best. One company I worked for had an entire store system, including inventory and payroll, in a box with an Intel 8080 chip. Everything was written in machine code and it worked flawlessly.
The way we do it here is paper ballots and a scanner. The county BoE regularly spot checks the machines to see if there are any common errors and after the election does some checking again.
The German ballots mentioned are apparently a lot shorter than the ones we have, and there is no mention of how large their ED's are.
Our ballots in a Presidential year often run into two pages with federal and local races and propositions. We have the President, a Congressman, a Senator, the entire town board, Assessors, highway supervisors, county legislators, judges, dog catchers and who knows what else running on as many as five or six party lines. ED's around here run about 1,000 voters each and if 60% show up that's 600 ballots with maybe a hundred or so choices that have to be counted and recounted at the precinct level. I thought everyone knew that human error is far worse than machine error.
Our school board and village elections don't use the county machines and are hand-counted within a couple of hours. Of course, hardly anyone votes at school board elections and there are very few choices. Pretty much the same with village elections. Even so, I've never seen results in 15 minutes.
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