There are significant differences that make electronic voting less secure.

But first, the ballot box stuffing argument sounds nice, but it's easy to stop: check the registers for how many people voted in the precinct and if the number of ballots doesn't match, something's wrong.

This is just one example, but it points out something very important: elections officials have a lot of experience beating those scams and have put procedures in place to avoid them. Electronic voting machines are brnad new.

Second, electronic voting brings with it the possibility of systematic fraud without a large number of people involved. Computer viruses carrying a voting fraud payload are just one example of how a single individual could carry out a widespread attack.

Third, electronic voting distributes the security problem. In the old days, there was a computer that tabulated the votes, but it was centralized and easily secured.

No one's arguing punch cards are good, but if we're going to spend billions of dollars updating the voting system, you'd like to end up with something more secure than want we've got now. Unfortunately that didn't happen.

So, the question before us is how to make the most of a bad situation.