There are three oft-touted benefits of electronic voting: voter convenience, speed of processing, reducing the involvement of human judgment, cost reduction, and (especially in light of recent events) ease of use.

Voter convenience:

Private voting booths are essential to maintain the secret ballot. Voting from the privacy of your own home should _never_ be an option, considering all the things that could happen at home -- coercion, violence, apathetic people letting their friends vote for them, children stealing their parents' voting ids, and on and on. No currently feasible technology will eliminate the need for most voters to go to a physical polling place.

Speed of processing:

All proposed electronic voting mechanisms that I'm aware of solve this problem as completely as can be desired. The popularity of the world wide web has led many people to assume that electronic transmission of vote tallies would be an integral part of any electronic voting scheme, but elecronic transmission is simply a solution without a problem. Very sophisticated and very well-funded organizations have an interest in the outcome of many elections, from governments to security agencies to multinational corporations. If security problems prevent the electronic transmission of results, this does not detract significantly from the benefit of electronic voting.

Reducing the dependency on human judgment:

A voting ballot is digital data. Nonelectronic attemps to physically represent digital data evidently require more care than many citizens are capable of. The results are sometimes ambiguous, and no one with a serious interest in politics (hence no election worker) can be trusted to interpret them fairly. Digital electronic voting eliminates the ambiguity of choices on ballots, although other ambiguities remain.

Cost:

Electronic voting booths reduce printing and logistical costs dramatically. Initial outlays would be high, but the technology is already being brought to maturity in Europe.

Ease of use:

Obviously no voting system will ever be easy enough to use, and many people are perversely proud of their inability to operate simple devices. However, electronic voting booths offer several advantages. First, the booth can indicate the choice(s) a voter has made before allowing the voter to commit the vote and leave the booth. Second, if a dynamic display like a computer screen is used, not all the information must be displayed simultaneously, and information can be presented in a larger, clearer format. Third, audio, braille, and other accessibility-enhancing interfaces can be added (albeit at greater cost).

Where is Perl in all this? Electronic transmission of local vote tallies, presumably -- the greatest-risk, smallest-benefit aspect of electronic voting. Unless, that is, you want to allow voting from home, which would attract incredibly sophisticated and well-equipped attempts at corruption and disenfranchise millions of people who are not free to do as they wish in their homes.