The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections [1]. Countries such as Germany [2] Norway [3], Netherlands [4], France [5, 6], Canada [7] , Denmark [8, 9], Italy [10], United Kingdom [11], Ireland [11], Spain [11], Portugal [11], Sweden [11], Finland [11], and most other countries [11], protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.
[1] According to a 2020 Gallup World Poll, only 40% of Americans say they are confident in the honesty of U.S. elections. Finland and Norway with 89% of their citizens expressing confidence in the honesty of their elections along with the citizens of 25 other countries have greater confidence in their elections than do Americans.
[3] “Norwegian votes to be counted manually in fear of election hacking“
[4] “Fearful of Hacking, Dutch Will Count Ballots by Hand“
[5] “Voting in France: Paper ballots, in person, hand-counted“
[6] French Senate: Making the moratorium on use of voting machines permanent. CONTINUE, AS IS, THE MORATORIUM
[7] Canada Elections Act (S.C. 2000, c. 9). Part 12. Counting Votes. Election officer to count votes in the presence of others
[8] Denmark’s election law does “not permit electronic voting technologies to be used during voting”
[9] Folketing (Parliamentary) Elections Act, Translation (Consolidated Act No. 1260 of 27 August 2020) CHAPTER I: GENERAL ELECTIONS AND REFERENDUMS. Counting of the Votes Cast at the Polling Station, Part 9 “[T]he polling supervisors and the appointed electors, … shall count the votes cast at the polling station. The counting is public.”
[10] Election of House of Representatives and the Senate of the Republic September 25, 2022. Chapter 23. Ballots counted by officials.
[11] The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network. Vote Counting. Country List. See “Count votes by hand”