[ska]

That's fair - technology limits will vary place to place. I would think that something like RCV would be best done in a single pass though, so you have all the information up front. But of course I've never tried to implement it! My initial though was it was approx 5x actual counts, but that's far less than 5x labor because you only do the logistical parts once. So I was thinking you could do it with about 2x the labor total, which sounds achievable.

Personally I'm a fan of just committing to doing it by hand and accepting the cost in exchange for robustness against many types of manipulation. The problem is your argument works the other way also, the easier/cheaper it is to tally the votes due to reduced labor and # of people involved, the higher the risk of significant interference, imo.