The real risk is full digitization, which these voting machines provide. Our elections cannot be a black box. There are middle grounds. Paper doesn't have to b

The real risk is full digitization, which these voting machines provide. Our elections cannot be a black box. There are middle grounds. Paper doesn't have to be manually tabulated. Punch-hole ballots can be mechanically tabulated, fill-in-the-bubble ballots can be read with minimal software. Results can be aggregated by software and communicated over networks because the results can be audited with the paper trail (both cheap sampling/statistical auditing and an expensive total manual tabulation). If chads and improperly filled ballots cause problems, create a machine to fill in the paper ballot for people - but give the voter the ballot, let them verify, then walk over and drop it in a ballot box. If the NSA can't lock down their espionage weapons, we can't trust some second-rate politically-connected software vendors to run our elections. We need auditing, we need paper.