I’ve commented out that line at least until the next elections (end of May).

As for minutely counts, there’s actually demand from the users: they want to see their vote taken into account as soon as possible since the first moments of the elections. Delays up to an hour would be inacceptable here.

If submitting a job every minute isn’t the preferred way to update the counts minutely, please recommend some other approach.

I think that you really could set cronjob to run every five minutes for example. It's five times less ! Please remember that you use shared service.

If you really want to have a bot that instantly reacts, you can take a look on continuous jobs. But please remember to disable this when it do nothing !!!

Continuous jobs are really an option. I will convert my script into such a thing before next elections.