DRE Reliability Standards: An Open Letter to the EAC (Project 1583)

[Wilms]

DRE Reliability Standards: An Open Letter to the Election Assistance Commission

By VoteTrustUSA and VotersUnite.org

April 18, 2006

Dear Election Assistance Commissioners,

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Hardware Reliability is measured as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), but a more useful metric for voters would be the allowable failure rate, or percentage of voting systems permitted to fail on Election Day. Shockingly, the failure rate allowed under the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) approved by the EAC last December, is almost 10% in any 15-hour period (9.2% to be exact). To put it another way, one out of every 11 DREs or optical scanners are allowed to fail either partially or completely on Election Day, and a much higher proportion during extended Early Voting periods.

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The standards process that led to the current VVSG began with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Project 1583 Committee, who were supposed to arrive at their recommended standards by a process of consensus. But there was no consensus reached with respect to voting systems Reliability.

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In public comments on the IEEE's draft, as well as the 2005 VVSG, another engineer, Dr. Stanley A. Klein of Maryland had proposed a 15,000-hour Mean Time Between Failures, equivalent to a failure rate of 0.1% in 15 hours. Although Klein's proposed standard was about three times more lax than DuPlessis', and is a higher failure rate than that of a typical personal computer, it is still 92 times better than the Reliability standard in all three versions of VVSG, including the 2005 version recently approved by the EAC for publication.

Klein's proposal would allow 1 failure per 1,000 voting systems on Election Day. To our knowledge, this compromise was never presented to the EAC by the IEEE, or even to a plenary meeting of its Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) by those who vetted the public comments on the 2005 VVSG. The result is the same inadequate Reliability standard that has existed for central count voting systems since 1990, but is now being applied to polling place machines and systems in huge numbers under HAVA: an MTBF of only 163 hours, or a failure rate of 9.2% every 15 hours.

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http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1205&Itemid=26

[Bill Bored]

1. Hmmm...The EAC allows voting systems to fail a lot? WTF?

I'm glad to see so much interest in this thread which is proof positive how fucked up our election system is.

Now I know there are some on DU that think Exit Polls and things like that "prove" something, but here we have in black and white, documentation that those responsible for writing the voting system standards have engineered failure into the system, probably deliberately. And like any good conspiracy, there are only 2 or 3 people who've set this up, and it was done about 16 years ago when the first set of standard was written, by some of the same people.

I know this is isn't as sexy as all that cloak and dagger stuff, but come on people! It's right in front of your face. In the presence of a high failure rate, even if it's totally random, the party with the most voters per machine will lose more votes than the other party. Anyone want to take a stab at which party THAT is?

[Wilms]

2. Give folk a break, Bill.

Let's see; EAC, TGDC, MBTF, IEEE, VVSG and HAVA.

Sorry, the article maxed out at six acronyms, with no mention of exit polls.

If I post something like this again, I'll use bouncy frogs.

[Bill Bored]

3. Yes please, and don't forget that little man in the ballot box! nt