Yeah, pen and paper voting is harder to rig and won't malfunction as easily... but for the sake of efficiency, I hope they'll manage to get really working electronic voting systems.
meh, i wouldn't see it difficult to do such a thing. without even doing something program related.
you just place a server with NO connection to the net, nisba, not even half. or an inch.
like a big database.
you place one for each *voting place*
you place a monitor and ONLY a mouse.
so the input is just the mouse click.
the people you can vote for are on the screen. you click the one you want to vote, while someone, who stands in front of you but can't see your screen, looks what you're doing with your hands. so you can't use machineries of sort.
once it's done, you move all the databases to HQ and you make the counts there.
and the people who has vote rights present themselves at the pc the functionares have readied for them, after getting their data, so he's already logged in. and then he's auto logged off.
End of the problem.
no internet, no hackers.
no extra machinery, no way to hack it.
i do believe it would end up being slower (do to having to set for each monitor the account name for the vote of the person) but even then, it's safe.
That's pretty much the way the Electronic voting works here in Ohio...
You sign in, the people in charge of the voting booths activate the machine and you can vote on each of the issues/elections using a touchscreen. You usually have your back to a wall and there are little side panels so nobody can see what you voted. Your votes are printed on a receipt in bar code in a little window off to one side. I haven't looked into it further than that, but I assume the strips of coded paper are scanned into a machine later for the final count.
I don't remember if it was in this thread or somewhere else, but I recently read about some sort of possible man-in-the-middle voter fraud where the company that made the machines would send the votes to their server, then forward on the tally. I didn't get too much into it (truth or falseness of it) but there was a claim made that the company accepting the data was modifying the votes. Anyway... the point is that you can still have fraud even though it's not the person at the poll. It could be a programmer, company, or something along that line of data that modifies the count. This is why having an open system is essential to voting systems.