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I have never assumed anything other than that it would be humans, presumably mostly volunteers from the various political parties, doing the counting. That is how it is done in Sweden, and I think also a bunch of other European countries. It worked fine for us before we have computers and it still works. We get a preliminary result within a few hours, and a final result in like 3 or 4 days. And the problem of manually counting votes scales linearly with the population so the size of the country should not matter much.

You can solve this by using multiple scantron-like machines from any manufacturer.

You could put them in sequence and compare the results. If results diverge, you investigate why.

Yes, paper ballots still need monitoring and audits, whether they use electronic tally machines or not.

But those are both more straightforward with paper ballots than with other systems.