You’re thinking of the preliminary count in a polling place. On election night, basically the only thing that’s being counted (estimated) is which of the two (expected) main parties in a seat has the lead. It’s the only thing scrutineers pay attention to - no one watches the preliminary Senate count. Declaration votes (out of area) and below the line Senate votes (complex preferences) aren’t counted /at all/ on election night. No one has ever stopped me from leaving the polling place during a count.
Once the preliminary count is done, the ballots are driven off by the Officer in Charge into the night in his or her personal car for the real count. It’s not hard to be an OIC - it was offered to me while I was still at uni. There’s no particular ethical or vetting requirements to be one, and they’re often older folk who don’t bother reading the rules and requirements, and I’ve seen them do things that are brazenly illegal. Entire boxes of votes have gone missing in the past. We have had to re-run an entire election recently because of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Australian_Senate_speci...
It’s one thing to be critical of shoddy election practises and I support your indignation, but let’s not fall into tired “America bad” tropes. Elections are hard. We muck ‘em up too.
"Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, the cut-off for receipt of mailed postal votes is 13 days after election day." - https://www.aec.gov.au/media/media-releases/2019/05-17b.htm
That sounds like an unpleasant experience for the counters.
(The same happens in the States. Provisional ballots. Mail-ins. Ballots that wouldn't feed properly and need hand examination.)
I'm not aware of that actually happening. Here are some details on some allegations that were made, but the gist is that nothing improper actually did happen:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/12/donald-tru...
Anyway, I believe Australia has a prime minister rather than a president, so I don't think they can be talking about Australian elections.
Here in Australia, there are so many checks and balances when it comes to counting votes that it actually disgusted me when I heard some of the games various entities were playing in your last presidential election. The fact that the number of votes cast wasn't released until results were tallied and they kept "finding" more to count was perplexing. That partisan orgs like unions were given the contract to do the counting was also a really strange thing to do. And that scrutineers were kicked out in places was a disgusting act, here they by law must be allowed to watch everything regardless of political affiliation.
We also do not let counters out of the room until everything has been counted and accounted for and have multiple checks along the way to make sure nothing has been lost or added. Seems statistically unlikely to me that individual fraud would make any difference in US elections given how decentralised it is, if anything was happening it'd be powerful players controlling who is counting and how they are deciding which votes count and which don't.