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The election security procedure that is universal in Europe and Asia but not the United States is public or semi-public hand counting of paper ballots. This would be prohibitively expensive in the US because of the large number of races in an American election - it is very unusual for a European election to include more than two or three races, whereas a typical US election includes dozens of state and local races as well as up to three (President, House, Senate) federal ones.
Countries which have complete, accurate and up-to-date lists of resident citizens (i.e. not the Anglosphere) have meaningful citizenship checks to register to vote, and generally require a national ID card (which proves citizenship as well as identity) to be shown when voting. Countries which don't do Papieren, Bitte culture generally have weak voter ID cards which could be defeated with a $10 fake ID if anyone actually wanted to commit retail in-person voter fraud, which empirically they don't. (Postal vote fraud is much easier.) Apart from a few red states in the US, no country without a citizen register requires proof of citizenship to register or vote. (In general, in countries without a citizen register, the only strong documentary proof of citizenship would be a passport)
My browser ate an effortpost on this point, but the fate of ERIC demonstrates that the MAGA activist base is not acting in good faith on election integrity issues, so there is no point in the Democrats trying to co-operate with them or appease them. The median voter (quite correctly) doesn't care enough about election integrity for it to be a winning issue for either side in the general - the noise about election integrity is there because it is a winning issue in Republican primaries full of Dale Gribble voters.
Your objections are pretty implausible, and then you conclude it's the other party acting in bad faith!
This is what we did before vote-counting machines existed. It's what they still do in larger countries like India.
There are dozens of issues decided in an election at the same time. The median voter doesn't care about the Afghanistan pullout, so it's not important. It's fine if we do it again, because it's not a big deal.
It's there because political machines in the cities magic up tens of thousands of votes in the dead of night, counting ballots implausibly takes days, no other country accepts these processes, and any criticism of the above gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Then, if you try to recount the election, the chains of custody for these ballots are are illegally destroyed, and there's no proof, and then I get to hear from people like you how there's no proof of fraud.
India only have one race per election (rarely two), and they don't try to count overnight - they allow a full day for counting after several days to allow ballot boxes from remote rural precincts to be taken to the counting centre.
In the UK, we don't try to count more than one race overnight. If there are multiple races (e.g. Westminster and local elections on the same day) we count the Westminster election overnight and count the local elections the following day. Three races is about the practical limit for a full-day count - I have attended local counts with three open seats per ward, and London mayoral elections also involve three races (Mayor, constituency assembly member, and PR list assembly member) and in both cases the results come out late in the afternoon. London count the mayoral election on Saturday (polling day is Thursday) to given electoral staff and party observers time to recover from polling day - having done a day's GOTV followed by observing a three-race count the next day I understand why they do this.
Taking the largest state as an example, California had 4 major races in 2020 (POTUS, US House, both houses of the State legislature) and 12 propositions. In 2022 there were 13 major races (scheduled US senate, special US senate, US House, both houses of the State legislature, 7 statewide offices, Board of Equalization), 7 propositions, and 4 judicial elections. Add 2-3 county-level races, 1-2 city level races and 1-2 other races (e.g. school board) and you are looking at an average of about 25 races. Hand-counting that at British levels of efficiency (which are above the global average, and well above anything California could manage) would take about two weeks even if there were no contentious recounts. Americans expect the first count to be complete by the early hours of Wednesday morning, and MAGA are already claiming that delayed counts are evidence of fraud.
To hand-count all races in a typical US election in a one-day daylight count, let alone overnight, would be a bigger commitment of resources to vote-counting than any other country has ever made. There is a reason why the US adopted voting machines long before voting machines that actually worked were available - remember the Florida 2000 "chad" debacle. I'm not sure, but it looks like the US starts using voting machines around the same time that the media starts to expect next-day results. Would it be a good idea? Probably. Is it technically feasible? I don't know. The number of races you can count in parallel is limited by the size of the available count venue and the bandwidth of key senior people who need to review every result before it is announced. You also run out of sufficiently distinct colours of ballot paper. I remember the time the city council election was on blue paper and the county council election was on lilac paper - it caused several hours of delay and the administrator responsible was transferred.
Would convincing the media that they could wait two weeks for the state and local results to allow for a hand count to happen at reasonable speed be a good idea? It depends if it would actually increase confidence in elections. My gut feeling is that in today's America it would not.
Would reducing the number of directly elected positions so that there are fewer races to count be a good idea? Almost certainly in my view, but the argument about whether or not to elect the dog catcher is not primarily about ease of election administration.
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I'm embarrassed, since I claim to care about transparent election integrity but haven't heard of ERIC beyond this. Can you whip up a precis? I've only found https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207142433 and https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008 casually.
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