Many of the touted advantages of electronic voting can still be achieved with paper ballots if you use a computerized ballot marking scheme.

The basic idea behind a paper trail is that you take one of these electronic systems and you augment it with a printer that prints out people's vote as they vote.

I think that, you know, looking at all the systems that I've been studying over the last several years, that paper ballots with a precinct optical scan counters and random audits is the best system that we can have.

With the paper-based system you can see the ballots being marked, you can see them going into a ballot box, if you have good laws you can go watch them count the ballots, and with electronic voting all of that stuff is hidden inside the machines.

Our country moved to electronic voting in public elections before the technology was ready, ... This center will develop the fundamental science necessary for secure, accessible, trustworthy and transparent voting.

It's the concept of having a computer voting machine that bothers me, more so than the specific poor implementation that we have from Diebold.