It doesn't take a week to count ballots.
This is correct. I was the (contracted) company technician on-site for [brand of voting machines] at [a county in America] for the 2008 election. We tallied a total of about 100k votes. Dead simple. When the precincts closed, the machines dialed in by phone to a pool of modems, did a encryption handshake, and transmitted their counts to the server. I ran that server and supervised the rest of the process.
About ten precincts (out of almost a hundred) had machines that couldn't make the phone call, so the data cards were driven by hand in sealed plastic bags by poll workers (always in pairs) and hand-delivered to me to be fed into the voting machine in the server room, and then that machine transmitted its total to the server. I fed the cards in sequence, and someone else observed and started the transmission for me when I was done (again, always working in pairs).
While this was happening we also handled unscannable ballots (ones that had genuinely confusing markings or other defects) and decided whether to accept or spoil them (no, this wasn't the hanging chads thing). That was done by a committee (they asked me to participate as well), in front of the press, on the record, with audio/video for public scrutiny. Took us about 20 minutes to go through about 50 ballots (most were simple "didn't fill the oval" or "circled the oval instead of filling it in" mistakes where the vote intention was clear).
All of this was supervised by democrat and republican observers and regular office staff. Nobody was allowed in the server room by themselves -- it always had to be two people. The press watched (and recorded) us through a long window on one side. I refused to touch the server console unless I was being watched by someone physically in the room with me.
With
all of that going on, I handed the press representative a USB stick every 20 minutes with the current tally (so they could do their numbers game), and we delivered and certified the final count 3 hours after the polls closed. There were no objections from any observers or office staff, and it was a clean result that was never challenged or disputed.
Three fucking hours to tally 100k+ votes, deal with ballots filled out by idiots, glitchy machines that couldn't phone home, and more scrutiny than a thesis examination, doing it all by-the-book and getting it right on the first try. We were among the first counties to report final numbers that night. The county voted for McCain, so there were some really bummed people in the office when the election was called for Obama.
It's not a cakewalk to get it right, but when you're being honest, transparent, and know your job role well, it certainly
looks easy. And it leaves no room for doubt.
This "it takes a week, lol" thing is bullshit. They're rigging it somehow.
