>Get enough people to count them in that timeframe.

Whos going to pay for that? The US is essentially 50 different countries with 50 different budgets. The federal government could try to mandate this and help pay for it but states have rejected free heath care money because they don't want the federal government encroaching on their state and some states may push back and do the same. Therefore you'd potentially waste all this money and still have the problems that were solved with the electronic system.

>We use paper ballots here in Australia and get the election results that same night. The USA has 12 times our population and around 6-7 times our voters so proportionally it should be easier for the USA to achieve this than for Australia.

Easier? It would be much harder. The solution that many states are taking is electronic with verified paper trail(ie. the voter sees the printed ballot and verifies it before committing the vote).

This Optical Scanning system is a disaster in tight races. I would know. I was a volunteer in the Tiffany Caban queens election back in 2019 and I saw first hand how in a close race this system allows the more politically connected parties to push outsiders out by disregarding ballots that may have had any possible ambiguity: For example, there was a mustard stain on a ballot and the scanner tossed it out as invalid, it was only discovered after a lawsuit was filed and a manual count was done. In the end there were enough ambiguous ballots where they could not reach the voter that it swung the election to Caban's opponent.

Instead if you had DRE with Paper Trail generated by the machine like NJ has switched to, then you could have a clean concise re-count with no ambiguity.

Whos is going to pay for it? Many states certainly wont. If all states don't commit, then you are stuck with the same problem.