But the stampede to touch-screen voting was not inevitable.

Riverside County, with 635,000 registered voters, is the largest county in the nation to have converted entirely to touch-screen voting.

The biggest barriers to touch-screen voting are questions about its security and the comfort level that people have with the technology.

In New York City, some officials have been wary of touch-screen voting.

Some modern "touch-screen" voting machines allow people with such disabilities to cast a secret ballot.

Yet here's the curious thing: Almost no credible scientific critics of touch-screen voting say they believe any machines have ever been successfully hacked.

The new law will eliminate touch-screen voting in favor of the more trustworthy optical-scanning system.

The Legislature appears poised to do one important thing right: to require that touch-screen voting machines produce voter-verifiable paper records.

She said her own preference was for touch-screen voting, but only if the vote could be verified by the voter.

When state officials in California and Ohio explain why they're moving away from touch-screen voting, they inevitably cite hacking as a chief concern.