Reply #21: Seconded

[Heywood J]

(Note: In Canada, they use paper ballots hand-counted at the precinct level, and do it in one day. And who cares about speed anyway? What's important are ACCURACY and VERIFIABILTY and TRANSPARENCY.)

Yep, we have paper ballets that are similar in principle to optical scan (place your mark in the target). The final counts aren't always complete by press time, but by noon the next day, the winner is known. We also have automatic recounts determined by vote thresholds. All our paper ballots are hand-counted and transmitted to the central federal agency. The longest I have ever personally waited to vote is ten minutes, and that was at lunchtime.

The point of this is that it's very possible to run a system like that in America. Count the votes in parallel and have enough precincts to keep the counts small, you can have hand-counting results in time.
Sure, it costs $200M to run the election, but part of that is public financing for parties, and using the 10-to-1 rule, what's $2B for a fair and accurate election that produces reliable results when you're spending $2.7T in a budget.

ETA to fix tags.