I think the misunderstanding on your part may have been similar meaning I'm advocating for entirely electronic.
To me electronic voting means a machine generating your ballot which avoids spoilage like hanging chads, incorrectly filled out ballots, etc (paper ballots should also be an option). Electronic voting means using counting machines to tabulate everything quickly while creating & retaining a paper trail for auditing. This is literally what Schneier is talking about: merging the advantages of both to mitigate the disadvantages of either.
...if you assume the least useful interpretation of the comment. Could having a real physical object to examine be useful?
The paper as a "backup" is worse than backwards, it's an excuse to implement electronic voting, and since there is "no evidence" of problems, why would you need to examine the paper anyway?
Also, I think you're misunderstanding. The "no evidence" conclusion comes from auditing the paper ballot (as Schneier points out in that blog post above). You don't get to say "no evidence of problems" until the electronic & paper ballot agree. If there's disagreement you don't know which method is right & thus you have to hold a new election.
Then just use paper.
Recounts (which is what your suggestion will get called in practice) require legal maneuvers which are fought by the winning side. Adding a electronic component to voting will never lower it's complexity.
I don't know if it is the consensus opinion among experts, but it certainly wasn't the opinion Schneier expressed in that article.
Granted, he had strong words to say about the voting machines used in the US. And justifiably so. They are just plain horrible, they've been known to be horrible for years if not decades now and I find it hard to understand why the most sophisticated and wealthy places on the planet continue to use them. Particularly as we have known how to do it right for almost as long as they have been in use.
To Schneier's credit he does explain how electronic voting can be done securely in the article. Which makes your comment all the more puzzling.
That might be an understandable opinion if it is accepted as a conscious trade-off, but if you pretend that it will never happen you are just lying to yourself.
Or how about all the issues over running out of paper ballots, long lines, etc. With electronic voting you could have everyone pre-enter their vote electronically & just "drop" it off by scanning their phone & getting a printed receipt they can use to confirm their vote was recorded correctly cryptographically.
It is possible to actually design secure electoral systems that actually protect the integrity of the election better (better anonymity, better traceability, better auditing, less error, more accessibility, etc, etc, etc). Convenience is also important; there are even ways you can potentially design the system to run on semi-trusted hardware which means lower cost & more polling stations, easier access etc. This rhetorical argument of making fun of the idea as "we can wait a couple of days for the results" completely ignores the actual advantages of such a system. It also completely ignores that a paper trail isn't mutually exclusive from electronic voting.
The challenge is in making sure the process for creating these systems isn't corrupted, especially by technologically illiterate legislative leaders who don't seem to place any of the most basic protections that experts recommend. They also don't have the balls to hold the voting companies to task for designing secure systems; somehow it's a non-issue for the same companies to do the obviously right things when it comes to their other customers (banks).