> Hand-counting the ballots instead of scanning would be expensive in terms of time and money, and error-prone.
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 ).
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 ).