If the current situation is a farce, what description does more than half of the population being disenfranchised deserve?
States with paper ballots and electronic tabulators shouldn't have too much problems with election integrity, the electronic results may be tampered with, but the paper trail is much harder to mess with.
Paper trails are great, but are they checked frequently?
Personally, I'm more concerned that parties have easier access to the ballot and that people are prevented from voting than I am with records tampering.
You need a conspiracy at every precinct where you replace or introduce ballots.
I realize it isn't a perfect system, but you can't just fire up your laser printer and leave the extra ballots sitting outside the polling place.
Indeed. I'm not sure if you watched some of the clip I linked to but that it one of the things Abagnale speaks to. With decreasing budgets, increasing corruption, or a simple lack of ethics it is easy enough to compromise an individual and thus the whole system which they administer. Any social engineer will tell you it is far easier to hack a person than to hack a system.
This is why I would argue that a more automated electric system, one which relies on less human administrators, would would be more difficult for the average person to compromise than a paper-based system which relies on a higher number of human administrators.
Well, actually, the end result was that some counties went back to mechanical, and some didn't, and today it's all still a mess and it's impossible to have any confidence that your vote was correctly recorded. And now, in the digital age, voting is probably just this cargo cult ritual that we all do to summon this "democracy" thing that our ancestors once encountered.
Anyway, my point is, just publish the key. That makes it harder for the people who are embarrassed by this and want to bury it to do so.