The plan in California is to convert all voting machines to opical scanners. You mark your ballot with ink and when your finished, you slide it into the scanner which tallies the votes. When the polls close, the scanner transmits the tally to the county seat over phone lines and, voile, you have the results in a few minutes.

The paper ballots are also transmitted to the county seat so that a permanent record is available for posterity, recount or whatever.

We used that system in our little (ie low population) county in 2002 and it seemed to work flawlessly.

Bev and Jerry