More importantly, what problems are electronic machines solving? Having to wait until the next day for results?
Given how obvious and easy to execute this is, it seems impossible to imagine any justification for the change that does not at least consider this an acceptable plausible consequence of the choice.
Assuming perfect security and absence of software bugs, we'd be insane to prefer human counters to machine counters.
My point was just that there are obvious up-sides... so it's not like e-voting is some pointlessly insane thing.
I happen to think it's a bad idea even with dead tree audit trails, but I can respect the position that, with appropriate audit trails, it makes the voting process more robust.
Computers represent a single point of failure, one piece of malicious software could affect an election and nobody would even know. This problem is made even worse by the closed source machines in use right now.
Sometimes you gain a lot by having deliberate inefficiencies.
That said I believe that, absent major changes to regulations around voting machines, the labor cost is worth the security, transparency, and accountability benefits.
Automating the counting process must be done in a way that preserves the ability to manually verify the count - voting machines that do not produce a paper audit trail that can be verified by humans are fundamentally insecure.