It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR eithe

It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR either. It would be the exception, if it’s used at all. When I worked at Elections Ontario it was not OCR. I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race. American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.