Would you be willing to rely on this for something like tracking election results?

It really depends on your specific environment in terms of how much you are, or are not willing to lose information and it's all relative. I'm a fan of high performing databases (couchbase), or those more tunable (ScyllaDB/Cassandra), or build for indexing (elasticsearch), or those built for consistency (sql).

Each have their use cases, and there's definitely overlap. Understanding the difference and using the right tool for the job is important.