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So back in the day when voting was done by White Christian Men™ you would see a group of people gather in a town hall or other such gathering place and they would poll there. Voting wasn't necessarily anonymous and often times it was the majority rule in your polling place. They would collect that town's "votes" and send it to whatever oversight authority they had back in the day. Part of this ties into the electoral college (but is not the REASON for the electoral college) because they were able to collect the data regionally and were usually trusted enough not to fuck with the data/details on voting.
And it would take literally months to bring the information up from the south or the undeveloped areas out west before the rail network was established. Its PART of the reason they inaugurate the President MONTHS after the election. Hell, they used to inaugurate the President in March and not January because of the difficulty of communication and travel.
To answer your question directly, welfare; Yes. Yes they did/do.
The Florida 2000 "hanging chad" election is the one in recent memory that required more intense vote counting. Since then we've seen digital systems come in which make counting the majority of the votes on election night easy, which is why people seem to think the election HAS to be called election night. That, and George W. Bush declared himself "President-Elect" on election night even before the votes had been tallied.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Trump call the election for himself and some nasty legal fights to ensue in places like Pennsylvania, Florida, and possibly even Texas.
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