It seems like there are good solutions out there which can still take advantages of technology, it's not like we need to go completely Luddite here. I think corporate greed, laziness, and political corruption are more to blame for these failures.

The argument that these proprietary, closed-source election systems need to be secret and untested by local authorities because we don't want any vulnerabilities to be exposed seems really stupid. There shouldn't be any significant vulnerabilities to begin with, and the only way that can be ensured is if there is rigorous public examination of the machines and the code they use.

It sounds like there are two groups of county election officials; the corrupt old-guard type that scoff at any problematic allegations, especially if they have a slick Diebold marketer come to them and give them some glossy brochures with a campaign contribution ("legally") tucked inside, they're more than happy to jump on the bandwagon; or, the more skeptical, activist minded election officials which are limited from opening up and testing e-voting machines themselves by federal rules and regulations, and can only choose from a handful of "tested" options approved by the state elections board. I think if the "good" local officials could be empowered to allow for more robust testing of the current systems, as well as open the regulatory door to new options, it would a good step towards a solution.

Where I live now, we have touchscreen ballots, although it prints out a paper tape which I can look over and verify the accuracy of before leaving the poll. When I lived in California, they used paper ballots with punch markers, but those were fed into an optical scanner, with the totals being stored on (I assume) a memory card. They're very nearly the same system when you think about it, either the rolls of paper tape or stacks of ballots could theoretically be recounted, but in practice, the memory cards are the only thing which gets tabulated and reported as the official count.