I would actually say that the decentralized and distributed nature of the polling places, combined with the well-designed voting machinery, gave me more confidence that orchestrating voter or electoral fraud would be profoundly difficult.

From my experiences in other states, I would say it’s very possible to systematically lower voter turnout by making the process laborious, in part by having only a small number of polling places that you need to drive across town to access, and then by having long lines to vote (because so many people have to use the same polling place).

Given a choice between the two I personally would favor the decentralized model.

I suspect it's missing details, but I think this can be implemented in a fairly trustworthy way, using technology as an aid, but not the primary record of the election.

I think in a previous topic on HN, someone described his experience in one of the states way better. I'm describing what I remember, which may not be completely accurate:

You take the paper ballots, and you split them into lots. Each lot is passed through at-least two voting counter machines, and a recount is triggered if either machine produces a different result. Random lots are manually hand counted, to ensure they produce the same results as the voting machines.

To me, this makes the electronic counting extremely tamper resistant, as tampering with a subset of machines will very likely produce a discrepancy against other machines that is detectable. Or if the entire fleet of machines has been tampered with, this becomes apparent with the manual counts.

As for the machine at the poll, the initial scan can just be a best practice, that before the ballot is submitted can indicate to the voter if the ballot scans OK, leaving an opportunity to correct.

Of course, this is just on the counting side, all sorts of additional best practices are needed to ensure the paper ballots are transported securely, aren't lost or tampered with, are stored securely if a recount is needed, etc. And each step has scrutineers, even if the polling station is in someone's garage.