Can IRV elections be counted manually without much additional time or effort?
Yes. Tallying an IRV election by hand does not typically involve significantly more effort than conducting a traditional plurality election hand re-count. This is because the ballots first get sorted by first choice, and most ballots never need to be handled again, because the vast majority of ballots typically are in stacks of the two leading candidates. It is only the small number of ballots that are in the stacks of eliminated candidates that need to be looked at again, and sorted into the stacks of the continuing candidates. However, if there are numerous IRV races on a ballot, the procedure would need to be repeated for each race, so data-entry of ballot rankings, or optical scanning of ballots is faster.
