It's not insane if you look at the motivations behind who was pushing them.
We just had our municipal elections. Plenty of regular people saw the slowness and the expense of paper ballots. Some asked about switching to electronic voting, because even to a layman it's obvious how computers could potentially make tallying votes faster and cheaper.
The part that's not obvious is security and making results auditable. That's much harder for electronic voting, but it's not as obvious to a layman.
If most of those people is chosen randomly between the population, as it happens in my country, the system is pretty robust. As this is HN: It's a distributed system, every node making its own checks.
So, the answer to the complains is that the slowness and the expense are a feature, not a bug.