I agree with a lot of these ideas. This is what we did in San Diego county, CA, which I thought did a pretty good job (as opposed to the problems that we had with electronic voting machines in the march primary).

1) Optical scan ballots. Scantron style. Verifiable. The absentee ballots were identical to the normal ones, (is this normal?) and although very long, very very straightforward. We in california had about 60 things to vote on this year.

2) Although I cannot find reference for this, I was told that there is a 1% recount- 1% of all ballots are recounted manually to make sure that the machines agree with reality.

3) well, of course we still have the problems with provisional ballots, not a holiday,etc., but you can do early voting, and is quite easy to get an absentee ballot. In fact, some candidates mailed out a postpaid absentee ballot request form to you, that was already filled out with your name, address, etc. All you had to do was sign it, and drop it in the mail, then you got your absentee ballot. An excellent idea for a campaign.

3) Unfortunately, this situation is going to change- we're apparently going to go back to the pure electronic systems once they are "certified". However I like this system better. Hopefully other people will agree, now that they have used it.

4) Something interesting that happened in san diego specifically: The mayoral race became very interesting. In march, we had a primary, choosing between which of the 3, mid fifties, white moderate republicans that we wanted for mayor. Up until about 6 weeks ago, we had to choose between 2 of them, and they were splitting the vote nrealy 50-50. Neither of them was that popular, and there are currently a lot of scandals going on at city hall (i.e. we underfunded the pension system by 1.2 $Billion (with a B). So, a very popular city council member who had the lone vote in city council meetings to fix the pension system decided to run as write in. And it looks like she will win. One advantage of the optical ballot- you already have a pen and paper in your hand, with which to wrote someone in... The final vote: 35%, 34%, 31%. Note that the 35% is the total "write in"- they're still counting the ballots and are about halfway through.

Here's a pre-election article about the race. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/cities /20041018-9999-1m18mayor.html

Current results: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/cities /20041110-9999-6m10work.html
Another interesting website: http://calvoter.org/
The California Voter Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization promoting and applying the responsible use of technology to improve the democratic process.