The funny thing is that, when we go to a polling place on election day, we will almost always get a paper ballot to be used with an optical scan reader. This system actually hits me as an ideal: the electronic reader can be simpler and fairly decoupled from other systems, and each voter will leave a paper trail that should clearly indicate their intent. Admittedly, the electronic readers we use are probabally insecure and awful, but the concept hits me as fairly reasonable.
In this case, we are in the early voting period, and there are a reduced number of polling places - and each polling place can be used by any voter in that county, which means that voters might be (and probabally are) voting on slightly different races and using slightly different ballots. These machines remove the need for the early polling places to have a lot of valid paper ballots on hand while still allowing each voter to see and vote in all races they would be able to vote in on election day.
It's actually a fairly good use of voting machines, even if it would be nice if the machines were something other than terrible.