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The problem is, Diebold machines can be hacked.

What is the urgency to have results by the damn 10 o'clock news anyway?

A paper trail ensures an honest election. Period. (Anybody remember chads? Numerous recounts validated the results. Not possible with pixels.)

Throwing out the baby with the bath water is foolish. Electronic voting is dangerous and stupid.

A paper trail **is** possible, using a combination of multithread key (or touch) logs, standard DB, and paper receipt (a la Visa cards). You want independently threaded and operationally different keystroke logs in case ONE of them gets hacked, the DB for general review purposes, and the receipts (two copies, of course, one for the voter and the other to go into a ''ballot'' box, as paper ballots do right now) for purposes of hard recounts. Upload the e-tally (the DB) to Election Central or wherever, retaining the receipts against the potential desirability of a recount.

It would be extremely difficult to corrupt all three subsystems (five, actually) simultaneously, and the voting results would be available as quickly or more so than now, in some huge majority of cases.

I'm with you. I like the ballots I used last year. Plain old paper optical scanned ballots. Easy to mark, easy to read the results, easy to re-scan if necessary.

I don't like the fact that there is absolutely no proof after the fact, no paper trail.

Electronic voting would be fine if there was a private means of determining that your vote was actually tabulated correctly. e.g., you get a ballot number assigned to you which you can review on a website.