Whatever system is chosen, it has to be verifiable by the voter prior to leaving the voting booth.  And adquate voting access must be available at each polling place.  Enough working machines, enough paper ballots, whatever.  And the poll should remain open as long as there are people waiting to vote who arrived at the polling place within a specified time.  Also, allowances have to be made for individuals who find that their voter registration has somehow been mishandled, whether by accident or intention.  

As a retired programmer, I have both a healthy respect and a healthy disrespect for the use of computerized processes.  As we have seen, computers can be rigged, can be badly programmed.  Even if there's no intent to defraud, there are glitches.  My experience is that, no matter how brilliant some programmers are, human beings do not think like computers and the most surprising errors in programming come from that fact.  Needless to say, I am really not that sanguine about touch screen voting systems.

But the big problem is focusing on electronic problems, when human behavior problems are a bigger source of fraud and voter suppression.  Some of the tactics used to intimidate voters should not only be illegal, not only should the penalties be severe, but the remedy should not have to wait until after the election.  I'm not sure how to accomplish that - it would take a discussion by lawyers and criminal justice professionals to come up with a system that would bring justice quickly while maintaining a high standard of human rights protections.

For instance, it seems to me that Conquest Communications should have been shut down, but what process would have to have been in place for that to happen, I'm not sure.

As to the murkier calls telling people that they would be arrested if they voted, or telling people that the election had been cancelled - I'd like to see a discussion by knowledgeable people on how that situation could be handled in a timely manner.

It's time for a bipartisan solution: machines that are easy to use and that produce a verifiable paper trail.

I voted on one yesterday...good old fashioned mechanical voting machines.  

They work in a power outage, leave a trail, easy to use...everything electronic machines are not.

Second, where that doesn't happen (and it will take time), the Johns Hopkins folks have a simple, elegant answer. A touchscreen allows accommodation for the visually impaired, other languages than English, etc. After you vote, it prints your marked ballot, which you check and insert in an optical scanner. Problem solved: paper trail, no scan errors.