How Can I Trust The Machine ?

Ever since I moved to Amarillo, I haven't felt comfortable about voting. You see, Amarillo is very proud of it's electronic voting machines (like the one pictured above). They are quick to tell you how safe and efficient these machines are, but I have a lot of trouble believing it.

These machines have no paper trail. How can I be sure the machine is counting the votes correctly? The answer is that I can't be sure, because there is no way to check it. They can check it against the voter sign-in sheets to verify that the right number of votes were counted, but there is no way to verify the votes were counted correctly.

A machine is only as good as the person running it, and the people who run the elections up here are Republicans. I'm sure there are some honest Republicans out there (at least I think there are), but frankly I've seen too many Republican dirty tricks in my life to blindly trust them. And it would be too easy to "fix" the machines.

At the very least, there must be some kind of paper trail, so the totals can be checked if there is any doubt. How can there be a valid recount on a machine that has no paper trail? The machine will just keep giving you the same numbers no matter how many times you ask it, whether those numbers are correct or not.

Until there is some kind of verifiable paper trail, I will never be able to trust that my vote was counted correctly, and that bothers me a lot. We should be able to trust the system -- but I don't.