A simple mistake. I'm not putting this point in a 500 comment reply thread. I bet it's hot in there too.
Anyway. This:
Get rid of touch screen voting machines. A paper trail is useless, as a machine could easily be programmed to cast the vote for candidate A, while printing a receipt with candidate B's name on it.
Wrong!!! The reciept would not be for the voter to keep, it's dropped in the the ballot box, it is the official vote. It's not there to convince the voter the vote was counted, it is there to count in case the need arrises.
It is what gets recounted. If the machine registers for A but the ballot the voter checks is for B, then the vote will be for B when the recounter reads the same piece of paper the voter checked.
This is analogous to an optical scanner registering the vote for A when a human see that B was punched.
Update [2005-1-3 18:8:31 by pyrrho]: below fold cause of length rules.
here Kos is convinced. thanks DHinMI. Normally I fear not a few hundred comments... if I'm there at the start. To read from scratch... um... thanks DHinMI. But the rest of you...oh boy, you're still wrong.
PS: can we just get along?
END OF UPDATE
Computerized voting is the way to get voting error down in what we call five nines. That is, 99.999% accurate.
It's a SIMPLE matter of engineering. SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE. The problems you see before you are corruption and incompetence. I swear to god there is nothing unsolved about the type of software security needed to create an electronic voting system you could trust. The problems are interesting and deep and were solved as software engineering principles decades ago.
Creating a secure voting system with touch screens and computers, using paper trails, is absolutely for sure no doubt about it the best and only way to make sure we really do approach a day where we count each and every vote correctly.