Calfornia investigates dodgy voting machines

The US press has this week been covering the California state investigation into Diebold voting machines. Local officials have recommended banning certain machines manufactured by the company, and may pursue civil and criminal sanctions too. Diebold is reported to have installed "uncertified software without notifying the Secretary of State as required by law." In addition, battery failures prevented some people from voting.

Court proceedings hardly seem a sufficient response to non-compliance and failing machines. In the case of machine failure, what compensation can be appropriate when people lose the right to vote as a consequence?

As more sloppy development practices come to light in this field, it strikes me that what are in effect mission-critical systems are being developed and managed in a similar way to administrative batch processing systems of thirty years ago. Only with election systems, you can't have run another election tomorrow after the problems have been sorted out.