DRE Reliability: Failure by Design?

By Howard Stanislevic, Research Consultant, VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project

Abstract – The Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) are developed by a Technical Guidelines Development Committee that includes participation by the International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – a 375,000-member non-profit professional organization whose code of ethics states that its members shall “accept responsibility in making engineering decisions consistent with the safety, health and welfare of the public.” We show herein that the VVSG Reliability standard for e-voting systems, expressed as a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of only 163 hours, is woefully inadequate, resulting in voting systems of lower reliability than mechanical lever voting machines in use for over 40 years. This standard allows 9.2% of all e-voting systems to fail in any 15-hour Election Day, and a much higher failure rate during the extended “Early Voting” periods now being implemented in many states.

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In other words, the number of failed DREs allowed (F) is equal to the number of hours in the Election Day multiplied by the number of DREs in the jurisdiction, divided by the MTBF of 163 hours. With this MTBF, the failure rate allowed during any 15-hour period (F / N x 100) will always equal 9.2% or one out of every 11 DREs.

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