They work. I cannot emphasize enough that this entire "electronic voting" mishmash was due solely to the Democrats bitching about conventional voting techniques that had worked for years, until the discovery of the Gore Gambit.
Many times election results have been legitimately suspect due to corruption, cheating, stuffing ballot boxes, and other methods of cooking the results. To the best of my knowledge, the Gore Gambit, (which casts doubt on the accuracy of the voting system itself, even when used exactly as designed, without any criminal activity,) was used for the first time in 2000 in a major election.
In other words, if one is going to use the Gore Gambit to contest election results, there is no voting system that cannot be held suspect, with the possible exception of simple marks on paper. Even then, one could make a case that the paper-marking system was too "difficult" for certain targeted voting groups (why is it when a voter can't find his butt with both hands, everyone from all parties assumes that it's a Democratic vote that has been lost?), but at least dealing with it would be cheaper and easier. Of course, we wouldn't get the "instant results" the American public demands.
I can think of no way to make electronic voting systems immune to the Gore Gambit.
What's to stop the printers from spitting out a paper ballot that says one thing while the recorded vote says something entirely different?
How the hell do you deal with this kind of thinking? Most people suspect computers on general principles. To the layman, you could make one do ANYTHING. And no software expert telling them otherwise is going to allay their suspicions. People half-suspect them of being witches already.
The easy answer to this guy's question is that the boob doing the voting is supposed to look at the paper ballot and see that the recorded vote is what he actually voted for. The paper ballot then goes into conventional guarded ballot boxes for use if a full recount is demanded. Of course those using the Gore Gambit will say that this discriminates against those who can't read paper printouts...
Go back. It's not too late. For what it's costing to put these computers in every state in the union, we could have six month training programs for every Democratic voter in America to teach them how to poke a hole in a piece of cardboard.