Scanning?
Why?
In Canada (generally), the staff manually sort the ballots, and then count them. They write up a wee report and submit it to Elections HQ. Takes maybe an hour, sometimes a bit longer.
We generally know the results before we go to sleep. In spite of residing on the right hand side of a country spanning 5.5 time zones.
But there are always a few exceptional ridings that may be so close that it needs a Judicial Recount. They're rare.
One of the obvious root causes of the loopy system in the USA is that they have far too many elected offices. Their ballots are the size of newspapers. They elect their Dog Catcher, and (frighteningly) their Sheriff and Public Prosecutors (a monumentally daft concept in both cases).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
