An annoyance about voting

In the film, referring to the hand-counting of votes, one person says "... in, like, six hours they finished. Without computer or anything, how is it possible?" In the US, there is often debate over whether voters should use punch cards, optical scanners, digital voting, or some other bizarre device to automate voting and counting. It's just not necessary. Paper and human eyes work just fine.

The problem revealed in the film is that the process was not open to observers, and therefore we may legitimately suspect tampering occurred. This could happen with any voting system, at any speed.

Canada (and I believe Australia and much of Europe) hand-counts paper ballots, and usually the results are available in a few hours. There's nothing unusual or difficult about this. Iran has about twice the population of Canada, so it should have a similar ability to count votes by hand, even in the direct election of a president. Being the size of the province of Quebec should in fact eliminate some of the difficulties that Canada experiences being so spread out.

If Iran's vote counts routinely take longer than a few hours, perhaps something else is wrong with the electoral system in Iran.