[weegee]

Activists are demanding that ballot machine vendors include printers that produce paper receipts so citizens can confirm that paper results match their touch-screen choices. Receipts would go into a county lock-box for use in recounts.

BZZZZZZZZZZT! Hold it right there.

If a paper ballot is printed and placed in a box, then THAT is the ballot that must be counted, regardless of whatever was input into the machine.

There could always be a slight of hand from someone with a preprinted ballot in their hand that they place in the box. Such a mismatched ballot would "invalidate" the computer tally because there would be guaranteed to be a mismatch between some entries and the computer tally.

If voters are not smart enough to look at their ballot for any hanging chads (I've never seen one, even when I tried to dimple a ballot) then they most certainly won't reread the printed out card before putting it in the box.

Also, the term "touch screens" here is misleading. This is not just an issue with "touch screens" but all electronic ballot boxes (including those that use dial input devices).

[adx]

Why not combine methods? Touch-screen machines that print out a human-readable and machine-readable ballot (print the name, with the machine-readable stuff next to it), that then gets fed into an optical scanner? And include a touch-screen "keyboard" so you can hunt-and-peck for write-in candidates. No dimpled chads or guessing who they meant to vote for, since all you'd have to do is see what's printed, not written, on the ballot.