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While technically a faulty ballot that is to be rejected, it opens up for the "what was the intent of the voter" the same way the pregnant chads and multiple punched cards stuff we saw in Florida...

Not really. I think there's a very clear distinction between pregnant chads, multiply punched cards, and hanging chads. The first two are operator error, but the last is crappy voting machinery. If there are too many marks on a mark-sensed ballot, that would be like a multiply punched card, and is clearly a spoiled ballot. The pregnant chad issue would go away -- there's either a mark in the box, or not. Hanging chads would be like discarding a marked ballot because the voter filled in the circle, instead of putting an X (even though the machine still detects the correct vote). Dismissing ballots solely because of a technicality like that is just stupid.

Having voted in both Canada, and the US, I can safely say that the American punch card system is downright asinine, and eVoting isn't going to fix it.

The only way I can think to amend the proposal is to make the machine readable and the human readable parts of the printed ballot the same thing. We already have mark-sensing technology, so print out a mark-sense style ballot that the user can verify. Stuff it back in the machine, and it reads the mark. There's no need to make this really hard and print out a UPC symbol for the machine readable part, is there?

Oh, well. I just noticed a story on Google News the other day that a couple more states (Ohio and New Jersey) have Senators calling for mandatory paper trails in voting machines for November.