I’VE BEEN WRITING ABOUT THIS for a long, long, long time, and now something seems to be finally happening:

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election. Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Much of the unhappiness with electronic voting was mere conspiracy-theory sour grapes, as demonstrated by the fact that we suddenly didn’t hear much complaining once the Democrats won an election. But the underlying point that I’ve been hammering for years, that elections must not only be trustworthy, but must be obviously trustworthy, is a good one. Electronic machines are a black box, and harder to trust. Easier to trust systems are inherently good.