With respect to Scantegrity and our design objectives, Flaherty has it wrong:

A system that started as an attempt at secure voting without paper ballots has, ironically, evolved into a system designed for compatibility with existing paper ballot voting systems.

If he were to live in the shoes of a voting system designer for one day he would learn an interesting lesson: the barrier to entry for new paradigms is so vast, and onus on voters to learn anything new is so low, the only way to present truly new ideas, regrettably, seems to be to allow some people to believe they’re not new ideas at all.

We didn’t integrate a paper trail into Scantegrity because we necessarily think it adds security. But the pride of the 1850’s still gives folks comfort, and we’re not out to take that away from them.

What we’ve done, I think quite reasonably, gives people who want to verify an election a choice: paper trail verification if it floats your boat, and for those who want something more compelling, a new approach to proof of election integrity called E2E.

The fact is, Scantegrity incorporates both “old” and “new” into one system, which we felt was a vital direction, and I’m not bashful about telling you a lot of work went into it.