I find this whole mess around voting machines (in Maryland, where I live, and elsewhere) just fascinating. The Maryland state legislature just voted to ditch the touchscreen machines (they just went in over the last 2 elections) because they couldn't produce a paper trail:

The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.

The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 million to $16 million for the two elections.

The whole voting machine mess goes back to the 2000 presidential election, which - like the 1876 election, was disputed. In the aftermath of that, laws were passed in an attempt to apply a technical fix. This ended up looking a lot like the sort of management fad that blows through IT shops from time to time. You know the sort: "Everyone else is using Java, we have to!", or "XML is the best thing ever, we should use it everywhere!"

So here in Maryland, the state grabbed the touchscreenn machines in 2002, thinking that here was the technical fix for any potential problem. Well, not so much. The machines were different from the old optical scan system we used to use - better in some ways, worse in others (a lot like those management fads). Which takes us to the present - like the IT shop that decides to drop everything and start using (insert fad here), the state finally looked at the level of complaints (no paper trail) and the amount of money spent (a lot).

And where are? Right back where we were in 2000, with Optical Scan machines. In the technology industry, we call this kind of thing "management by magazine". This episode shows that the transmission method might be different (warring press releases from political advocates), but the end results look a lot alike - trying to fix a supposed problem by applying a "new technology" - without doing an actual evaluation of the costs/benefits - usually ends up failing. Badly.