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That's another thing, and it didn't occur to me on election night: No way did they hand count all of these ballots in so short a time period.  I don't care how many beancounters you've got, you can't count tens of millions of ballots in a matter of two hours by hand.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
by Drew J Jones (myfriends@thisispancakes.com) on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 08:57:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Actually, counting ballots is very highly parallelisable, so that's actually not all that hard, with the proper organizations. What's really hard is counting ballots that have not yet been cast.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 08:59:27 AM EST
[ Parent ]
It depends on how many precincts you have. Spain counts its ballots very quickly because working at the polls is like jury duty and so the number of voters per table is low and  it is possible to count the ballots at each table rather quickly.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buiter
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 09:01:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]
True, but my understanding is that the Interior Ministry's own estimate was that it would take 24 hours.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
by Drew J Jones (myfriends@thisispancakes.com) on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 09:04:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Because the Iranian count is centralised, apparently.

The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buiter
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 09:14:00 AM EST
[ Parent ]
That is what I read too...

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 10:42:10 AM EST
[ Parent ]
In a Danish election, ballots are normally counted no more than three hours after polling stations close, if everything goes off without a hitch. Of course, it almost never does, but the margins of error are rarely enough to shift more than one or two seats - certainly not anything on the order of more than one percentage point.

Ballots are usually recounted centrally on the following day (if the margin between any two seats is below a certain number of votes, which it almost invariably is when you do d'Hondt for the next best thing to three hundred seats...).

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Jun 14th, 2009 at 03:36:13 PM EST
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