I'm not quite as hard on the Bush Administration on this, and it's not all just political bias.

I personally believe that it would have taken a near-miraculous connection of events to anticipate the exact form of the 9-11 attack, and as I argued with Splinx, even had a very specific warning been received, what could have been done about it that would have been politically acceptable at the time? Unless the specific flights were known ahead of time that were going to be hijacked, one would have had to intercept and search every Middle Eastern man boarding an airliner that week, risking the certain wrath of civil liberties organizations. And when they searched them, they would have found what? Box cutters? At the time, it was legal to carry a box cutter on a plane, which the hijackers knew well. And unless we knew for sure ahead of time they were going to run the planes into buildings, and not just fly to Cuba, would fighters (assuming any got there in time) have been ordered to shoot down planes full of people? I don't have good answers for these questions, and I don't think too many other people do either.

Hindsight is wonderful, but let's not go overboard with it.

All that aside--

One of the wonderful features of a massive government bureaucracy is that somehow, no one seems to lose their job for screwing up. And it goes a lot farther than just 9-11, and sure as hell it ain't confined to conservatives. How many people got fired after the first WTC bombing? What happened to Reno after Waco? Pick any administration and an associated screwup, and whaddaya know, everybody's still at their desk the week after. We eventually get to vote on the bosses, but only every four years. So it goes.

And Florida should have its act together before November, so don't sweat it. Personally, I think the best bet would have been to go to optically-scanned ballots exclusively, which seemed to get a pretty good review both in this primary, and in places they were used in the 2000 election.

BTW, what the heck ever happened to the old-fashioned lever-pulling voting machines of my youth?