Counting paper votes is a solved problem, and nations that use entirely paper ballots don't have slow preliminary counts. Australia, for example, has a somewhat

Counting paper votes is a solved problem, and nations that use entirely paper ballots don't have slow preliminary counts. Australia, for example, has a somewhat complicated preferential voting system and relies entirely on paper ballots, and yet they are generally able to provide a conclusive result the night of an election (with televised tracking of counts throughout the country). This may not make sense intuitively, but counting paper scales quite well by being distributed to the polling locations and physically sorting the paper ballots. The Australian Electoral Commission documents the counting process quite thoroughly [0]. The only time counting paper takes a long time to get a win/lose result is when results are close enough that every vote needs to be counted. This is surprisingly rare in practice. [0]: https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/index.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/index.htm