After a couple of centuries in which we have been voting with ballot-papers and absolutely transparent counting procedures, nowadays we are starting to use the electronic vote. The debacle of the USA 2000 Presidential Election is presented to the public opinion as a reason to lead to electronic vote, but

• We should not change the way we vote only because we had problems once in a couple of centuries.
• Things went wrong in USA 2000 only because of the unnecessary technology (do you remember the machines that badly punched votes?).

Did all the past elections have problems? Do you really suspect Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, JF Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G Bush and Clinton, have all been elected thanks to errors or fraud?

To date (2008) the great majority of democracies of the world elect their Parliaments and Governments using hand counted ballot papers without any serious problem (small, very localized doubts are always solved recounting ballot-papers).
Only Brazil, India and USA use electronic voting for nation-wide political elections.

A very good example of paper elections which to date (2008) never had any problem are the italian paper electoral procedures

On March 14th 2004, Spain has elected its new Parliament using the traditional ballot-papers system. Ballot boxes were beautiful transparent plastic boxes, not invisible and unverifiable memories of computers! Soon after the closing of the election, the first projections showed who the winner was and the morning after the final results were available. Those results, being manually counted and checked (and verifiable again), were not only official, but even without a shadow of a doubt.