[chendies]

The benefit of transparent elections outweighs the costs of counting paper.

If we really wanted to do elections cheaply, we'd just hire a couple of undergrads to write a Node.js script and give polling stations some desktop PC's loaded up to the page. Would hardly cost anything. But doing elections cheaply is not the point.

[specialist]

For the USA, precinct-based paper mediated voting is the cheapest option.

We don't need PCs. Self contained scanotronic style systems (think SAT tests) work just fine. In fact, all but the largest jurisdictions (because of ballot size, complexity) could get away with manual counting.