Have you ever been an election judge? It doesn’t take that long to count the ballots... unless you have to make adjustments to account for the extra ballots. :)
bfl
I’ve been an election judge in WI. Ballot counting is automated. It’s the double checking of the count (proving the balance) that takes a long time — particularly if somebody has made a mistake.
We were there in my precinct until 1 AM in the Nov. 2010 election. I wasn’t the judge for that one; I was in charge of registration. But, some of the assistents were careless and somehow 7 votes were switched from one Ward to another (there were 2 different ballots). It took all night to figure it out.
Personally, I think that 7 people messed up their ballots and reached over and helped themselves to the wrong ballot while the precinct workers were distracted. (We had 2 ballots at our box with different names and races on them.) We had 7 more people voting in one of the elections than registered and 7 less people casting ballots in the other election than registered.
The reason that I think that was the explanation is that I was registering people and I observed the group huddled at the table ignoring voters while they opened and checked absentee ballots. I reported it, but the Chief Inspector didn’t believe me. The County Clerk decided that the ballot box had malfunctioned which is a much scarier thought than if 3 Dems (that’s why I was watching them) weren’t paying attention.
The registration book and the blank ballots for the election that was overcast by 7 was located closest to the voting booths. The 3 Dems were flapping their mouths and not paying attention to what was going on around them. It sounds hard to believe, but 7 people just took a new ballot, except is was the wrong ballot. Apparently they were too stupid to notice that their substitute ballot had the wrong names on it.
Or, would you rather believe that the electronic ballot box malfunctioned? Actually, a malfunction wouldn’t explain it because we had an actual ballot count that was wrong by 7.