I agree with Avedon Carol that we ought to have real ballots. We should also have standardized voting procedures so that folks in the poor neighborhoods don't vote on machines that are more likely to misread their ballots than those counted in wealthy terrains.
I disagree slightly that receipts wouldn't be necessary if we had real paper ballots. What I would like to see is a system where you vote via touch screen and the device spits out a little card that lists all your votes in plain English…and also has them encoded in a little barcode at the bottom. Instead of signing in to vote when you arrive, you would instead sign in as you leave, verifying that the receipt card accurately represents your votes.
On the way out, you could — totally at your choice — let poll watchers or reporters scan the barcode part of your receipt. This would be roughly the equivalent of participating in an exit poll, as many of us do now, but it would be easier and have more value. If the tally in a given precinct was wildly off the exit polls, it would probably pinpoint error or fraud in counting. Someone could also check to see that the barcoding matched the votes, minimizing another possible area of screw-ups.
Vote fraud and error are both possible with any system. The argument against the old-fashioned paper ballots — and this was not without some merit — was that they were counted in precincts without central oversight. My mother had the voting at our house a few times in the "paper" day and also early in the punchcard era. If we got all our buddies together to run a polling place, there'd be really nothing stopping us from marking a lot of Republican ballots "spoiled" and replacing them with ballots marked for Democrats…or vice-versa. Touch screens were supposed to eliminate that possibility…and I guess they have, though they've created more dark holes than they've filled. I really think the best system of all would involve me being able to take home a certified copy of my vote. Then some proof is in my hands, not theirs.