I also agree that this is a complete non-issue.
Anything can be rigged, fixed or otherwise tampered with.
Matter of fact, I would be willing to go so far as to say that every presidential election has people cheating or attempting to cheat on both sides.
It doesn't matter because they cancel each other out and individual cheats aren't going to be able to effect anything other than the one polling place they are working at, AND they likely only have a tiny chance of succeeding.
A massive conspiracy to rig the voting machines is completely rediculous and would be uncovered before it ever came to fruition.
Or perhaps you think Diebold themselves would rig the voting machines. While this is certainly possible, it is really, really, really unlikely for many reasons.
Sure Diebold might have financial reasons for favoring one party over another, but their net gain for rigging a vote (which they might have won anyway), is not NEARLY high enough compared to the consequences if they were caught.
Secondly, I really doubt Diebold is making special edition voting machines for particular elections, so that means they are programmable by the end user where the end user inputs the candidates. It is much harder to rig in cases like that, since they would have to anticipate future elections, and hope the end user filled in the political parties in the order they wanted.
I am also all for the lack of paper trail. Because a paper trail would be much more open to manipulation AND it would make for endless recounts.
I have had the same job for over six years, after about a week I realized that 90 percent of my work was checking to see if the computer printed out the same numbers that it contained inside. I stopped checking those numbers 6 years ago. Now I just print them up and put them in the envelope. The fact is that the computer is not going to magically print out different numbers that it contains inside, and even if it did I would have no way of knowing which one is right.