I rather like the system my town uses. You must draw a black ink line next to the name of your intended candidate. The line completes the middle section of an arrow pointing to a name and the whole ballot is inserted into and read by an optical scanner. Early 80s technology and damned near infallible. No chads. No touch screens and most importantly...no Windoze programs needed to access the machine and tally the votes which are then entered into a database that allows various reports to be run...or modified.
We scrapped electronic voting machines in Sarasota County after the 2004 election (Whiny Christine Jennings is still wailing about losing by 254 votes!). We converted to optical scanned paper ballots for the 2006 election. The instructions were quite explicit, “Use the supplied marking pen to completely fill in the oval next to the candidate you wish to vote for or your choice for each ballot initiative.” After voting the voter puts his or her ballot into a scanner and it either accepts a correctly completed ballot or rejects a ballot that is incorrectly marked. I was waiting behind an old lady who inserted her ballot three times and got it rejected each time. I glanced over at her ballot and saw that the woman had simply put a check mark next to her choice, missing the oval entirely. I guess that there is no voting system that can overcome stupidity.