Acknowledging that site selection is counted under different circumstances than Hugos, I find it interesting to note that when I was doing it, we generally validated the ballots before counting them. The exception came at the very end, when late-arriving ballots were trickling in. This was very exciting in 1993, when we had three nail-biting finishers. I added the ballots to the database to see what would happen, but we did have a certain amount of "if these ballots are valid, we have this winner, but if they aren't, we have that winner."

I found data entry very fast. What took longer was checking it for typos. These were pleasingly rare. Having two people do entry for the same set of ballots was a good first check for this.