This is all totally irrelevant - I speak as a former candidate for both the UK and Scottish Parliaments.

The count needs to be verifiable, and needs to be simply comprehensible.

The paper process has the following check points:

* the ballot box is seen to be empty at the beginning of the process

* the turnout can be collected and collated by the candidates nominees during the day

* the first count is the ballot count which the candidate's nominees can check against the recorded turnout

* the papers are sorted for the second count, publically - and the candidates nominees do what is called 'a box count' from which we can predict the final result

* the ballots are bundled and tallied in public

* disputed papers are agreed by the candidates and the candidates representatives

* the candidates have an automatic right of recount if the margin is below a certain amount, and at the returning officers discretion otherwise

On top of that we have collected voter id information and Reading cards so we can estimate the result based on the marked register after the event.

What this means is that not only is the result verifiable, it is publicly verifiable by almost anyone with basic high school maths.

The reason this is important because I have worked elections with Nazi candidates - and I worked in Belfast when the civil war was on and the degree of trust across the political communities was very low.

The critical purpose of the public count is not to establish who has won the election, but to bind the losers, and their voters into the result.

If I had to stand up on a platform and the Nazi said "they used these machines to take away our vote" and my only response is to start talking about how there are some papers that show if you have hard to factor prime numbers you can generate some low-collision hash or some other random klingon space talk, then it is game over.

The proportion of the UK who withdrew their consent to be governed during the 30 years of the war in Ireland was less than 1% - rising to 10% of Northern Ireland. Making it easy for a tiny number of people to be pulled out of consent by political extremists is crazy, crazy, crazy.

The 2007 Scottish Parliament election in the UK had a crappy ballot (edited originally said 9% which was wrong an error rate 4 times higher than expected - think of Florida's hanging chads across the whole country). If 26 votes had gone another way in one constituency we would have had a Labour Government not a Scottish National Party one.

This ballot paper was combined with electronic counting and it was a total shambles.

As a tallyman on the night I could not endorse or verify the result at all - we had no idea what the result was - except what the machine said it was. Everyone was all geared up for legal challenges - but the leadership of the two parties got together and agreed that everyone should walk away and we would let the chips fall as they did.

I never want to see that again - and we don't hate each other in Scotland like you American's do.

Paper ballots, paper counting is the way to go. (Don't get me started on how your electoral boundaries operate - or the fact that you don't have an independent electoral commission).