Mark Your Ballot

If you are wondering what the discussion around electronic voting is about, go to Open Source Politics, where John has
set up a demonstration of what can be done (easily and invisibly) with a computer voting system. It is particularly scary when you also follow the story far enough to notice that the CEO of the company that makes the voting machines being considered for use in Ohio has promised to deliver Ohio to George W. Bush.
Sometimes it’s best to hang on to old technology until you can insure that the new one will do the job at least as dependably as the old one. And there is a certain comfort in knowing that there is a piece of countable paper out there with my mark on it.
It would be easy to program computers to print out your ballot after you mark it so you could drop it into a box to be counted if the outcome was questioned. After all, when we go through the supermarket checkout, don’t they give us a list of what we selected? What possible reason could there be for not providing for a possible re-count in a democratic election?