We've had seven years to fix this

And yet... a story just moved by the AP reports that Florida voting machines are still not entirely tamper-proof:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - 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 whether 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.

Let me clarify; it's not that easy. To get to the memory card one would have to unscrew the case, which is kind of hard to do without drawing a lot of attention. But I'm not even comfortable with chances of it happening being that small. What happens when voting machines are being transported to the polling place? Are these things constantly being watched?

I hate that I'm sounding like a bad Mel Gibson movie--that narrows it down, right?--but voting is one of our most important rights; it is preservative of other rights, in fact. If something in this world needs to be absolutely tamper-proof, it's these damn machines.