It most certainly can, and did so until the advent of electronic voting.
The trick is production line counting: multiple people (3 - 5) count every single vote, while each counter has a watcher, handing each ballot off to the next counter for verification in production line style, and others all watch the room and everything in it. All political parties are represented; all watchers and counters are observed and switched up; everyone in the room has both the right and the responsibility to speak up about any anomaly, and they do.
Even when electronic counting gets fucked up, like in Palm Beach County in 2000, manual counting was still used. Remember butterfly ballots and hanging chads? The counting rooms in Palm Beach County worked every ballot in exactly this way, and at the time, night after night, the evening news was full of videos of watching them do it.
I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it is absolutely possible and even common to manually count ballots rapidly in such a way that not a single vote gets missed. We did it for over two hundred years in the US, and that’s how it was in the 90s before electronic counting became a thing.
All you’re really telling the rest of us is that you don’t know the history or the mechanics of voting.
It most certainly can, and did so until the advent of electronic voting.
The trick is production line counting: multiple people (3 - 5) count every single vote, while each counter has a watcher, handing each ballot off to the next counter for verification in production line style, and others all watch the room and everything in it. All political parties are represented; all watchers and counters are observed and switched up; everyone in the room has both the right and the responsibility to speak up about any anomaly, and they do.
Even when electronic counting gets fucked up, like in Palm Beach County in 2000, manual counting was still used. Remember butterfly ballots and hanging chads? The counting rooms in Palm Beach County worked every ballot in exactly this way, and at the time, night after night, the evening news was full of videos of watching them do it.
I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it is absolutely possible and even common to manually count ballots rapidly in such a way that not a single vote gets missed. We did it for over two hundred years in the US, and that’s how it was in the 90s before electronic counting became a thing.
All you’re really telling the rest of us is that you don’t know the history or the mechanics of voting.