FLORIDA BALLOT MACHINES STILL SCREWED

Hey, you're old enough to remember the mess that was the 2000 presidential election? How Florida's vote was so screwy that really, to this day, we're not 100% sure (or even 80% sure) if Bush really won? Well, in 2004, for the next presidential election, the state of Florida decided they'd update a bit and use the electronic ballot boxes a bit. Well, it turns out, that didn't go so well either and now with 2008 around the corner somebody decided to test out the electronic ballot boxes again, to see if the new ones worked well... or at all.
As it turns out, they didn't.
The following cutting comes from [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073101027.html|a July 31, 2007 article] from AP.org available at WashingtonPost.com and reports all about it this lovely story:

Florida's optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see if the machines were still vulnerable to attack.
"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.
The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

Oh it goes on, but I won't.
The whole idea of electronic machines being hack-proof is absurd. .

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