Why are we considering electronic voting?

We do need to get away from punched cards. That's obvious. But why not use scanned paper ballots everywhere?

It seems to me that optically scanned paper ballots are a very simple, cost effective way of running an election. Especially since they only get used twice a year. They're cheap and have a built in audit system. I don't know how much the current electronic voting machines cost, but I imagine it's plenty. How about four orders of magnitude more than a pencil? And from what I've heard, not all the machines used in 2004 have paper audit trails, and thus are not secure.

Yikes! What am I missing here?

Beside the cost, I think any of the electronic machines would be really easy for somebody at the manufacturer to manipulate. It would be rather simple for a programmer to insert code to switch a small percentage of the votes cast. And only on election day so it wouldn't be caught by testing.

Andrew Tanenbaum on electoral-vote.com notes:

If we go to computerized voting without a paper trail and the machines can be set up to cheat, that is the end of our democracy. Switching 5 votes per machine is probably all it would take to throw an election and nobody would ever see it unless someone compares the computer totals and exit polls. I am still very concerned about the remark of Walden O'Dell a Republican fund raiser and CEO of Diebold, which makes voting machines, saying he would deliver Ohio for President Bush.

Double yikes!

Andrew also wonders if anybody has looked into the exit poll discrepencies to see if there's a correlation with electronic voting machines. Just wondering. One's imagination could run wild here. If one were paranoid.