Diebold Election Systems and the other makers of electronic voting machines are teaming up to radically improve the security of direct entry digital voting machine, according to this article in the Washington Post.

But they don’t want to put printers in the machines, because that would add $500 per machine.

Personally, I don’t think that printers are needed. After all, we already have a Supreme Court opinion that says, essentially, “in the event of a recount, there isn’t enough time to actually recount all of the ballots, so just give the election to the team with the most lawyers.”

(For more on the debate about the merits of computerized voting machines, you can read a column I wrote in September, which prompted this rebuttal from Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.)