I heard this on election night: 9 million Florida votes counted in 2 hours, the balance by midnight, but didn't realize Jeb Bush deserves credit for the improvement

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It's Time for States to End Their Horrible Vote-Counting Systems and Adopt the Florida Model

It doesn’t really matter who get credit for the reform, of course, but Florida’s success shows that it can be done. So why isn’t it? There must be a reason (ahem) for stretching vote counting over days.

Guy Benson:

“… Twenty-four years ago, the outcome of a presidential election came down to the Sunshine State, spawning a chaotic, messy process that dragged into December.  Democrat Al Gore didn't concede until December 13, following weeks of legal wrangling, competing court rulings, and public protests.  George W. Bush won, fair and square, would have won by more votes under a full statewide recount (and was almost certainly harmed by news networks wrongly calling the state for Gore while voting was still underway in the most conservative part of the state).  But many Democrats never accepted the loss, and their toxic election denialism lingered for years.  After the nightmare of hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and other absurd foibles, Florida's governor -- the victor's brother -- set out to ensure that such an embarrassingly spectacle would never play out in his state again.  He undertook a fact-finding mission to gather, study, and implement as many best practices on elections logistics as possible.  The result was a 2001 overhaul that set Florida on a path, including various updates and fine-tuning over the years, to becoming the nation's gold standard in vote counting:

Five months [after the 2000 election], at the urging of Jeb Bush, the state Legislature enacted a sweeping overhaul of Florida's election rules. The Election Reform Act of 2001 banned the use of punch-card voting machines and required the secretary of state (rather than county-level elections officials) to have the final say over which kinds of voting machines could be used in the future. The law also clarified Florida's rules for automatic recounts and set more stringent time frames for the certification of vote counts—a move intended to prevent the seemingly interminable recounts in 2000. It also created new statewide rules for issuing provisional ballots and how those would be counted, with an eye toward ensuring as many Floridians as possible could vote...

..."Florida is famous among election nerds for having the fastest reporting of vote totals in the country, with near-instant results on election night," says Andy Craig, the director of election policy at the Rainey Center, a centrist think tank. In a report he authored earlier this year, Craig calls Florida's vote-processing procedures "the gold standard" for other states to follow. Per state law, counties can begin processing mailed-in ballots up to 25 days before Election Day. That includes just about everything except the actual counting: checking that signatures are valid and that the votes have been legally submitted. Counting those ballots officially begins 15 days before Election Day and must be completed by the time the polls close. Leaking the results early—a legitimate fear, as it could influence the decisions of voters yet to cast a ballot—is a felony offense. There's never been a leak. The process buys valuable time to get things right. 

“In Florida, close to 11 million votes were tabulated accurately, reliably, and quickly last week, just as we saw four years ago.  Floridians have robust early voting options at their disposal, backed up by various integrity-securing safeguards, and ballots are processed as they come in.  As soon as polls close, a huge batch of already-tabulated ballots are reported, with millions of Election Day votes counted up extremely efficiently.  Even when results are much closer than we've seen over the last two cycles, each of which resulted in GOP blowouts, races are able to be called in a timely manner, almost always on the night of the election.  This lends credibility to the process and inspires confidence about the results being fair and legitimate, even to the losing side.  There is absolutely no reason why other states cannot adopt the Florida model.  They should.  And this is not at all a partisan statement -- several of my Democratic friends concede that Florida simply has a sound, replicable system.”

… Florida has demonstrated how even quite a lot of early and mail-in balloting can be accommodated without ludicrously drawn-out counting procedures.  Maintaining outdated, inefficient, idiotic systems in place is a choice.  How can that choice be justified?  Here's a spokesman for Florida's governor rebutting the excuses made by an Arizonan: