They use to have many many places to vote. Maybe a couple thousand people assigned to each location. At the end of the night it was easy to count all the votes and then add them to the larger totals. Now they insist on having central voting locations that deal with 10s of thousands of people which makes it hard to tally all the votes in one night.
This is by design. Central planning and having things done from one area. One size fits all is the govt way. Much better to have many small locations who can count all the votes before midnight. If there is an error it's is a small error instead of a catastrophic error with huge consequences.
Small countries can have the results before midnight and yet state with multitudes less population need a week or two to tally the results.
We no longer have election day, we have election season. This needs to be trimmed down a lot. Maybe Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon and then election day. More than enough time to have everyone cast their vote. Mail in voting should be limited to people overseas that can't be present or people in the states with valid excuses.
The machines were suppose to make it easy and with quick results. Now the machines make it complicated and the counting takes substantially longer than in yesteryear when we did it by hand.