Man, I miss those good ole voting mechanical monsters that they have back in Pennsylvania.
Here in Chicago, this is the first election where we're using touch screen machines. Despite the troubles in the Preliminaries, they seem to be doing things (almost) right. I already voted, and the system is easy to use, and verifiable. I was afraid of the mis-aligned touch-screen issue that I often have with stupid ATMs (I'll try to push $60 withdrawal and end up with 80 or 40... and without any chance to correct it), but that never once happened - and they asked if my choices were correct before submitting them. Then, once you're done voting, it prints your choices and scrolls it past you, giving you one last chance to check your votes and change anything if you want. So, there's a written record that was verified by the voter. Of course, in the primaries, they lost some of the ballots
... but that was probably more due to the fact that it's *easy* to lose a memory cartridge of thousands of votes. Try doing that with thousands of paper ballots. Uh, yeah, I think they all fell under my sofa cushion.
Then, they're mandated verify 5% of the votes against the electronic record. I'm a little rusty on my Probabilities, but I believe that even if there would be a winner determined by only 250 votes out of an electorate of 1 million (0.025%), there's a 1 in 250,000 chance that they don't catch one of those 251 fraudulent (or faulty) votes that would have falsely swayed the election. Of course, they'd have to take great care to ensure that there is no doubt that
every single one of those 5% (50,000 ballots) were accurately checked and randomly chosen, but this is an extreme case.