Touch-Screen Machines Stir Election Anxiety in Md.,

Touch-screen polling machines, which will be used statewide in Maryland when voters go to the polls for the Sept. 12 primary, were intended to calm fears of election flimflam raised in the wake of the infamous 2000 presidential balloting in Florida.
But the new machines themselves have become a politically charged topic in Maryland. Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who agreed to purchase them three years ago, now questions whether they can provide fair and accurate elections, given their vulnerability to computer hackers and their lack of a paper trail to document votes.
[. . .] The Brennan report notes that systems without paper trails — a paper record or receipt that voters can use to confirm votes — lack an important countermeasure to software attacks: the ability to compare paper to electronic records.

They can talk all the want to about “securing” the machines, etc. But here is the problem. NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO, as long as there is no “paper trail” – a physical record of each vote that is CHECKED BY THE VOTER, then there is NO WAY TO KNOW if the machines were hacked or not. With no paper trail THERE IS NO REASON TO TRUST THE RESULTS of the election because no one can PROVE that the results are accurate.
Period, end of story.