I think you ought to be able to confidentially get back what the votes were. But I could be wrong.

As Dan said, the problem with this is that once you have physical proof of who you voted for, you can be paid/threatened for your vote. Here at berkeley our on campus elections provides some kind of crytographic key to retreive what your vote was counted as, so it is possible. We don't worry about the bribery aspect because the voting takes place online and the stakes aren't that high. I thought the source code for this was open, but I can't seem to find it.

Recipt printers cost nothing, it really doesn't make sense that these voting terminals can't keep a paper trail. The problem with a paper trail is that it's going to expose what everyone in elections knows but won't admit -- that a margin of error exists whenver large numbers of ballots are counted.

Anyone want to place bets on when the first election has to be reheld because of a glitch in the computer system?

Matthew