Is your county going to allow 12 days of early voting?

[spin]

5. That is a fair point ...

and I basically agree.

But to be realistic lets suppose that an election occurred in a county and candidate A received 10,000 votes and candidate B got 8000. In that county there were 1000 absentee ballots. Is it worth the time and expense to count the absentee ballots as they would make no difference in the election?

I propose that we need to develop an absentee ballot that could be run through a machine and counted just as a ballot cast at the polls would be. This would be a definite improvement over our current system.

Of course any electronic vote tabulators have to be both tamper proof and hacker proof. They also should provide a paper trail in case of a close election or if there are serious questions about the reliability of the election results. Such machines should be certified by an outside reliable organization or several before use.

Note that it might already be possible to run absentee ballots through vote tabulating machines that currently exist. If so, there is no excuse for why this isn't done.