In the meantime, the only safe option is to use the paper ballots, which are available on election day. (For early voting you must use the electronic machine.) But the neat part is, when you’re done voting, you feed the paper ballot into the optical scanner, and it does a pre-scan to detect any voting errors. So if you spoiled your ballot by overvoting or undervoting, it will give you back your ballot and you can correct the errors.

That solves most of the major problems. If a voter can’t accidentally spoil his ballot, we won’t ever have a debacle like happened in Florida with the hanging chad issue.

I’ve used both types of voting machines that you mention in your comment above. I had an additional concern when I used the electronic machine for early voting. In our early voting set up, more than one precinct was voting at the same location. Each precinct’s ballots were slightly different, so it was up to the election worker to select the correct insertable electronic module to be put into the voter’s machine. It seemed to me that it would have been very easy for the harried workers to hand me the wrong module, thus allowing me to vote in some one else’s precinct. (Maybe they had some way of preventing that, but I couldn’t tell that they did.)

Since most everything is Microsoft based, and until we go to open source systems, the vendors control how far we can go in verifying the information. Not very far!

The biggest problem is that the trail is a placebo, because it isn’t used for any count the day of the election, and never for the recount, which rarely happens with an electronic election. Too much work, and with the Holt Bill, not mandated to solve its anomalies.

Anyway, after the TV decides a winner, that’s it.

What is to recommend electronics for voting?

Can’t think of a thing.