Unfortunately, this piece, like so many others, ignores the fact that the optical scanners, privately owned and programmed, counting our votes are as fraud-friendly as touchscreens. The right to open and public vote counting can not be replaced with the right to recount - and NH recounts don't hold water because there are no security procedures in place for ballot chain of custody. And NH's response to recent citizen scrutiny of this failure? They just passed a law making it more difficult to obtain recounts. Add to that the fact that someone went out of his way to specifically exclude ballots from the public records law so that no post-election forensic investigations can ever take place. All of which begs the question about NH's famous paper ballots and recounts, what's the state trying to hide?

The below is an excerpt from the magazine "Federal Computer Week"

This week’s election could be the last — at least for the near future — in which electronic voting systems play a major role. That’s because fears about election fraud have heightened concerns about the reliability of high-tech voting systems.

Those worries are nothing new, but the narrative has shifted. In previous elections, most experts were concerned about the systems’ security and frightened by the prospect of hackers tampering with votes without ever being detected.

This year, the story has focused on voter-registration fraud, a decidedly low-tech concern. Many states bought systems that do not provide a paper-based audit trail that could be used to verify results if the vote is close and fraud is suspected.

Unfortunately, even if incidences of fraud never materialize, people’s security concerns will remain largely undiminished and the lack of a paper trail will still be considered a liability.

Election officials who bought the latest voting systems are no doubt looking back wistfully to earlier generations of technology, such as optical scanning, in which voters fill out paper ballots that were scanned and tallied electronically. If necessary, those votes could be verified by human eyes.

It’s a classic case of technology being rushed into use before it’s ready. People bought into the promise of the technology — most notably, the reduced possibility of human error and the quick returns on election night — without giving full consideration to its potential weaknesses.

Money probably also factored into their decisions because requiring a paper audit trail would have added to the cost of the systems and the complexity of election operations.

Unfortunately, some states are likely to face even bigger expenses as public pressure mounts to invest more money in fixing current systems or tossing them out altogether and starting from scratch.