One, why does it take so long to report. I mean, times up, look at the tallys, count the ballots, check the math, phone the state capital. Checked, rechecked, reported. Shouldn't take more than an hour, two at the most, right?
Secondly. You know how many people come in to vote. You add up the vote totals. If the vote totals were less than the number of people coming in, wouldn't you try to find the discrepancy before reporting? Can you ever envision a legitimate scenario where ballots would be stored in a janitor's closet?
Sounds logical, but doesn't always work when a ballot contains several elections and/or initiatives. Not every voter votes for every race.
Often, I've left lines blank if I didn't know enough about the people running to make an educated choice (my bad).
Some people are single issue voters and may just go in to vote for or against a ballot initiative or for/against a specific person.
If there's just one choice on a ballot, then it would seem logical that the number of voters who came in to vote would equal the total number of votes cast for both candidate.