For once, there was what seemed at first sight to be a sensible suggestion on Slashdot. Here's my slightly more expanded version. Shoot holes in it for me.

The whole point of the punched ballots or the electronic voting system is to make the counting more efficient, right? Manual counting is too slow.

Giving the user an electronic receipt opens the door to vote coercion.

The punched card systems didn't work because the butterfly ballots were confusing to those senile old biddies who still, for some reason, are considered able to vote, even though they're all probably too old to go to the bathroom unaided.

They also suffered from "hanging chads".

The electronic system doesn't work. There's no record kept.

The suggestion on Slashdot was this (expanded by me):

You have a touchscreen (or whatever) PC which the voter makes their choice on. With some UI design skills, and sufficiently large fonts -- even pictures of the candidates -- these should be easy to use and less confusing.

This then prints out a combined machine-/human-readable ticket, so that the user can confirm that their vote is correct. If it's wrong, they do whatever they would have done if they screw up a normal paper ballot (I don't know what happens here). If it's right, they put it in an electronic ballot box.

This is exactly like a normal ballot box: paper goes in, paper doesn't come out, except that it's got an electronic reader in it which reads the machine readable part of the card.

If the count screws up, you just put the box of cards back through the machine. So it's like the punched card thing, only it won't suffer from hanging chads ('cos it's not punched), it won't suffer from the confusion of the butterfly ballot ('cos you've got UI experts in).

Now, it's potentially still open to abuse by the e-voting machine manufacturer, because it could print different human-/machine-readable values on the one card, thus electronically stuffing the vote. It's still just as good as any other e-voting machine in this regard, though. You might be able to come up with a system that uses dummy ballot papers (that don't actually get counted in the final totals), and you can check that they got registered correctly. The guys in the booth just pop these in the machine at intervals through the day, and they can be checked against their known values.

Thoughts?