I didn't say a word about who might try to hack voting machines. It's like asking Willie Loman why he robbed banks; people will hack voting machines if it's possible to hack voting machines because that's where the votes are.

Other than the obligatory last-paragraph partisan shot, not a bad approach to voting machines. But I wonder if you (and many other people) are putting a somewhat nostalgic spin on paper as a secure medium for votes. Election fraud's been committed with paper ballots for as long as there've paper ballots, and some of the methods actually map directly to security for electronic voting machines. Some things are eternal, like interception--the votes have to get from the booth to the election office somehow, and boxes of paper ballots have been intercepted (usually to be trashed, rarely forged or altered). Nowadays we'd worry about electronic packets getting intercepted in transmission, and perhaps a greater opportunity for forging vote data. Seems like many of the security concerns are common to any voting technology, and new technology just introduces twists on old vulnerabilities.

The thing about software safeguards is that it's cost-effective to put in a lot more of them than you can in the physical world--like having a hundred times as many personnel monitoring elections and keeping ten times as many paper records. The irony of the whole controversy over electronic voting machines is that if it's done right, we could finally achieve unimpeachable and accurate election results simply because technology makes it cost-effective.

My architecture in a nutshell: The software can protect the voting machine from tampering, encryption and electronic signatures can prevent tampering with the data in transmission, each transaction (vote) can be logged electronically in multiple locations (machine, precinct server, county server, state server) on write-only media like CD-ROM that can be rapidly compared in the event of a dispute (in fact it would be economical to always audit an election afterward--hold a manual recount, in other words--to detect tampering even when nobody suspected it)...[take a breath]...If the hardware is built by competing manufacturers to a common reference spec, you can have safeguards like the election department installing their own disk drives and nonvolatile flash memory, built by other vendors, and installing open-source election software that they've compiled themselves.

Can you imagine trying to do all that with paper? Ye gods, man, that would be working too hard!