In the 2026 election, only 1.3% of voters were registered in jurisdictions that use direct-recording electronic machines without a voter verifiable paper audit trail (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/voteE...). 67.8% of voters are registered in precincts that primarily use hand-marked ballots, and the balance mostly use BMDs to generate premarked ballots.
Votes close at 10pm. Might be a few stragglers left in the queue, so call it 10:15pm. (Exit poll results are embargoed until 10pm.)
Ballot boxes are transferred from individual polling station to the location of the count. The postal votes have been pre-checked (but the actual ballot envelope has not been opened or counted) and are there to be counted alongside the ballots from the polling stations.
Then a small army of vote counters go through the ballots and count them and stack together ballots by vote. There are observers - both independent and appointed by the candidates. The returning officer counts the batches up, adjudicates any unclear or challenged ballot, then declares the result.
The early results come out usually about 1 or 2. The bulk of the results come out about 4 or 5. Some constituencies might take a bit longer - it's a lot less effort to get ballot boxes a mile or two down the road in a city centre constituency than getting them from Scottish islands etc. - but it'll be clear who has the majority by 6 or 7 the next day.
I can appreciate that the US is significantly larger than the UK, but pencil-and-paper voting with prompt manual counts is eminently possible.
It looks like a paper document intended for a human, and it certainly can be. A machine can also read it. (And does, prior to it being cast: the ballot is deposited into what honestly looks like a trashcan whose lid is a machine. It could presumably keep a tally, though IDK if it does. It does seem to validate the ballot, as it has false-negative rejected me before.)
But now the "paper trail" is exactly what I submit; it's not a copy that I need to verify is actually a copy, what is submitted it my vote, directly.
Why should you be forced to trust that what you're shown is also what was being counted? The paper record should be the actual ballot itself, with your actual vote on it.