Why can’t a savvy (and dishonest) programer fiddle with our Optical Scanner machines to mis-count votes too? Of course the paper ballots would be a check to any skulduggery, but they’d never be checked unless there was reason to believe that some caper had gone down.
They could! That's why I don't think there should be any automated counting of votes. I think it should be done by hand, with representatives of all candidates and parties there to supervise.
Just because computers and machines can be made to do something doesn't mean they should. Some things are just way too important to introduce the chance of fraud, and vote counting is one of them.
I know ballot boxes can be stuffed. But it takes a whole lot more widespread corruption to pull it off than paying or blackmailing a single programmer at a single company like Diebold.
So what if we don't get the election results for a week? What difference does that make at all?