Re: how about
As Claptrap314 and Big John wrote, mark-sense ballots (which are typically "fill in the oval" or "connect the arrow" or the like), while not perfect, seem to be the best compromise. They can be machine-tabulated and also manually verified; they are easy for voters to use, provided the ballots are well designed.
Hand-counted paper ballots, lever machines, and mark-sense systems significantly outperformed the alternatives on fraction of residual votes (undervotes and misvotes) in the well-known MIT / Caltech Voting Technology Project study. Mark-sense has no statistically significant difference from lever in this respect. Mark-sense provides immediate visual confirmation of the vote for the voter, and unlike lever doesn't need a separate paper trail, since the voter is marking up a paper ballot.
There's some thought that voters are more comfortable with mark-sense ballots than with lever machines, thanks to school training, as Big John suggested. The MIT/Caltech paper mentions this.
It also notes that mark-sense optical scanning machines were somewhat more mechanically reliable. That may just be a fluke.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
