> I think a lot of the verification problems for electronic voting could be solved by simplification and using old 'outdated' technology. You don't need a full fledged PC to tally votes, you need the computing power of a 30 year old calculator that could be built on a 2-foot wide board with large and simple traces. Something somebody at home with a multi-meter could probe around and test.

Even that's too complicated to be trustworthy. That's why I think optical scan ballots are the way to go: even a totally unskilled, untrained regular person would feel fairly confident that they could count them.

IMHO, all the technology investment should be put into processing and validating ballots after they've been filled out. Personally, I like the idea of a voter being able to feed their optical-scan ballot into a machine at the voting booth that will let them verify it will be read exactly as they intend. Then they carry it over to the ballot box to be tallied by a separate machine there.