Should we go back to paper ballots?
Yes, yes, yes.
I live in the Seattle area of Washington State. We used to have a nearly perfect system and I would like to see it adopted everywhere. (We now have mail-in voting only, which is convenient but I worry about fraud.)
Here's the perfect system:
Ballots are stiff paper/very light cardboard, printed with oval "bubbles" next to the things for which you can vote. You vote by filling in a bubble with an ink pen.
Once you are done voting, you feed the ballot into an optical reader over a collection bin. If you have made any obvious mistakes (such as voting for both candidates for a single position) the machine kicks the ballot back out to you; you then get a fresh ballot and vote again.
Once my wife had a little ink smudge on her ballot, and the machine kicked it back. It was designed to err on the side of absolute clarity; if it accepted a ballot, that ballot was unambiguous.
The optical reader keeps an unofficial tally, and at the close of voting the tally is forwarded to the state elections department. An unofficial but very accurate result is available within an hour or so of the end of voting.[1]
There are physical paper ballots so there is a literal paper trail. Recounts are easy.
There is no "hanging chad" problem; the optical scanner at the polling place makes sure that each ballot is unambiguous.
Then all you need is a good "chain of custody", making sure that all ballots are delivered (and no fake ballots are introduced into the counting).
[1] Of course, absentee ballots will also be counted and the absentee results will not be available that fast; but non-close election results will be known that fast.