Seriously? A DELETE button?

Recently I ran into this article concerning the findings of a three months investigation regarding problems with voting machines in California. Now, I've had discussions with some of my friends, in particular with Scott Harmon, about all the problems with voting machines, and why it's just something very hard to get right, but the people involved in the design of the machines discussed in this article seemed to be working very hard to get it wrong. According to the findings of the investigation, they put a button, which by the way was next to the one used to request a print, that basically deletes logs. That's right, it deletes the log from the memory, even if it hasn't been printed and there's no paper trail. What's better is that it doesn't even prompt you with a message asking you whether this is something you really want to do... nothing! It just deletes the log as if nothing happened.

Now, what were they thinking? Hasn't all the debate and discussions about the problems with voting machines reached the people that are actually making them? And why, oh why, didn't anyone notice this until now? Now, after it was used in an election and there was a loss of about 200 ballots (according to the article). I mean, really? So, you're meaning to tell me nobody thought this was not a good idea!

There has to be a problem of miscommunication here. The academia has put out many articles in the past couple of years, where experiments and extensive studies have been done, and things like this have been pointed out as big problems. Yet, you still have to see this in the news, as if the work of those people never happened. It looks as if the only people looking at that work (which is payed for with taxpayers money by the way) are us, the geeks, and the rest of the world seems to be oblivious to all this information... until something bad happens.

*sigh* Seriously, my hopes for humanity decrease by the day... Hopefully, now they will start listening to the computer scientists and designing these machines with all these problems in mind, from the get go... yeah right, what am I even saying? Sometimes I think they put that delete button on purpose. What's even hilarious is that it took a three months investigation to notice a delete button in the machine :-).