Actually, one very useful improvement to current elections would be to include in all vote tallies including early returns abstain votes, uncounted ballots, and spoiled ballots. From the very first election returns, the total of votes for all candidates in a race plus the above ballot candidates should equal the number of people that voted. Any change to that total should be cause for suspicion. If this reporting had been in place, one of the problems in a Florida recount, were the ballot-handler failed to run all the ballots through the machine, would have been detected.