Edit: Deleted some stray formatting.
I am an Australian, so my experience with elections is substantially different from that of US citizens.
In my country, voting is seen as one of our fundamental civic duties, like paying taxes, so all competent citizens 18 years and up must enrol to vote and are obligated to vote in local(shire/municipal), state and federal elections. Of course, life happens and not everyone gets to the polls on the day, so typically our elections see turnout of 93-96% (including pre-poll voting by those with commitments that prevent them from voting on the prescribed day).
It all seems to work with very little fuss, unlike what can be seen in the US.
Come with me below the fold for my two-pence worth on the merits of Australia's electoral system ...
To facilitate all local, state and federal elections, a government body called the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is tasked and funded to maintain the electoral roll, establish an appropriate number of polling locations for election days and staff those locations, secure all the ballots, count and collate the results.
It all seems to work with very little fuss, unlike what can be seen in the US. Don’t get me wrong. The effort by the AEC and its many thousands of (temporary) staff for each election is huge, but it is all carried out with efficiency and a lack of drama.
Now, in Australia we vote with pencils on paper, numbering candidates in our preferred order from 1 to however many are running in the contest, as we have Preferential Voting . That means in a contest with more than two candidates, if nobody gets 50%+1 in the first count, the candidate with fewest votes is eliminated and their ballots are reallocated according to the 2nd preferences of those voters. This process is followed until someone achieves 50%+1, so our system selects the "least-disliked" candidate, rather than simply the most popular as you do with your first-past-the-post system. This mitigates the impact of "third-party" candidates, so in 2000 with Nader on the ballot, Gore would have received most of Nader’s votes as 2nd preferences and you would not have had ... you know.
The great benefit of having paper ballots of course is that all candidates can nominate scrutineers who oversee the counting done by the AEC. Scrutineers can check ballots that are discarded because of incorrect markings and check that correct ballots are being correctly applied to the various candidates.
This makes for a robust, open process that is much less susceptible to claims of manipulation than seems to be the case in the US. Some results are still challenged in court processes, but this is limited to very close contests where a few hundred ballots out of many thousands will swing the contest either way. It is exceedingly rare for someone to successfully challenge an AEC count.
Now, not all of our election results are known with certainty on election night, but the AEC is usually able to make a provisional declaration for each contest. Some close counts with multiple distributions of preferences can end up taking several days to a week, but note that we are talking about a much more complicated counting system than is used in US elections. (Our senate elections very rarely can take more than a week to count due to diabolically complex preference distributions with fifty or more candidates for half a dozen positions on the same ballot.)
Why am I typing all of this guff in the hope that some good people in the US will read it?
Well, you seem to have so much angst about the conduct of your elections and our elections seem to just happen with so little fuss. Australians are not necessarily that much smarter than Americans, so why can’t you guys and gals get it sorted out? It is not like this voting thing is a new phenomenon that still needs to be worked out. You have been doing it regularly for a long time. Selecting who will govern your society is a solemn civic duty* and you will all be lining up to do it again and again and again...
Please for your own sake (and sanity) do something to build a national body that can set not minimum standards, but uniform standards for voting – and not just how you govern enrolments, but the structure of ballot papers, voting booths, ballot boxes, custody and storage of ballots, scrutineering of ballot counting etc.
When you play by the same rules all over the country, it is much easier to inform everyone about how to make a valid vote.
You owe it to yourselves to take the fuss out of something that comes around again and again, just like the seasons of the year.
* Digression: As a young man I thought the imposition of a requirement to vote was an impingement on me and everybody else. If I didn’t see a candidate that I wanted to vote for, why should I have been compelled to vote?! Ah, but time is a wonderful teacher. Over the years, I have observed in horror what goes on in many other countries and I have had a special sense of awe at the awfulness of US elections and sometimes its politics.
Because Australia has compulsory voting, no party can succeed with the Rovian strategy of, "D@mn the middle, we’ll just look after our own". Compulsory voting combined with preferential counting forces political parties to compete for the middle ground, which makes for usually moderate policies, leaning right when the Liberal-National coalition is in power and leaning left when the Australian Labor Party (yes, they spell it without the "u") is in power.
Of course, being a hybrid system merging the Westminster system with elements of US Federalism, we have other checks and balances in our system, diffusing power so that no one person can really go off on a folly of their own. But compulsory voting is an important part of why Australian politicians of the left and the right never forget the middle class.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of Hawaii
(With apologies to whomever it is you think wrote Shakespeare’s plays)