Since I'm going to be out of town next Tuesday, which happens to be the USAian Election Day, I stopped by town hall this afternoon and cast my ballot. And I can feel reasonably certain that my vote will be counted properly, since Acton uses machine-readable paper ballots.

There's been a lot of debate over how poor the security, reliability and recountability of the electronic voting machines is. Frankly, I see an easy technical solution: keep the touchscreen UI, but have each touchscreen machine print a plain-paper, human-readable, filled-in ballot which goes in the box to be counted. The printout can have fancy barcodes to speed up automated counting, too; but the key is that the voter can doublecheck that the votes are as intended before putting the ballot in the box.

Of course, that's a technical solution to a political problem. Sigh. Ah, well, at least I know my vote's in.