Can't touch this

An update to the business about touch screen voting I mentioned last Thursday, from the Mercury News for December 17.

Also Tuesday, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed announced legislation that would require electronic voting machines in Washington to produce a paper trail. If the legislature approves it, touch-screen machines in the state would be required to produce paper receipts by 2006. Voters would get to see but not touch or remove the receipts, which would be kept in a county lock box.

That makes at least four states that have moved to require some form of paper trail from the machines. The doubts are growing, and rightly so.