This is in no way intended to be disparaging: there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales.
> there are processes that work within the scale of small European nations that simply won't at larger scales
Coming from Ireland (tiny population, low pop density) I've heard this argument countless times (we're an obvious target for this critique), but I still to this day don't see the logic of it. At all.
Constituencies are sized per capita, count centres are staffed per capita, if you have higher pop-density you'll either have more observers at count centres, or the same number at more count centres. This is a distributed system - it's the definition of scalable.
Fwiw the last count I tallied at (Dublin MEP) had an electorate of 890k. It was the smallest constituency in Ireland in that election, but still bigger than the largest congressional district electorate in the US. We counted in one large open warehouse. There were 23 candidates & 19 separate repeating counts.
That could work in favour or against your argument - I don't really know - I don't really think it matters either direction though.
This doesn't make sense. In the same way that police, firefighters, ambulance, farmers, etc, can scale to any country population, so can ballot counting.
