There’s been a lot of e‑voting news this week. A California research team released a report demonstrating serious security flaws in the touch-screen voting machines in use there. And a Florida study found that some of the previously-uncovered flaws in the voting machines in use there had not been fixed.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, there have been intense negotiations under way on the Holt-Davis legislation, which would outlaw paperless voting machines and require random audits of voting results. Under the legislation, every voting system would be required to produce a voter-verified paper ballot that would be the official record in the case of a recount.

It’s far from a perfect bill. My preference would be to outlaw touch-screen voting entirely, with or without a paper trail. One of the biggest flaws in the legislation is that it will allow states to use touch-screen voting machines with cheap cash-register-style thermal printers in the 2008 and 2010. In my view, using cheap printers would be a serious mistake; thermal printers frequently jam, and the paper tapes they produce are brittle and hard to deal with. Using such cheap printers dramatically increases the danger that election officials won’t take the paper trail requirement seriously.

Crucially, the Holt-Davis bill doesn’t require states to use touch-screen voting machines at all. States may, and in my opinion should, return to using old-fashioned optical-scan paper ballots. States have been using optical-scan technology for decades, and it has far fewer security flaws than computerized voting machines.

But if states are going to have time to implement changes in time for the 2008 election, Congress needs to act quickly. It would be unfair to state officials to pass legislation in 2008, just months before the election. The Holt-Davis bill isn’t perfect, but as Lawrence Nordin and I argue in an op-ed in The Hill today, it’s a step in the right direction.