Howard Stanislevic's full report, “DRE Reliability: Failure by Design?” can be downloaded here. A second report "Voting Systems Batch Test Results – Reliability," by Stanislevic and John Gideon can be downloaded here.

What if your computer had to be replaced every month or two … ATMs failed to work properly 10% of the time … your cell phone broke down every ten days?

Current federal standards allow almost 10% of electronic voting machines to fail every Election Day, according to “DRE Reliability: Failure by Design?”  a new report issued by the VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project.  The report notes that the acceptable failure rate is even higher  – approaching 25% -- in a 5-day early voting period.

The report was authored by Howard Stanislevic, a network engineering consultant whose experience includes working with the Internet Engineering Task Force on Internet Protocol Performance Metrics.  Stanislevic points out that the failure rate allowed for touchscreen voting machines (also known as Direct Recording Electronic or DRE) exceeds the actual failure rate of the 40-year-old lever machines still in use in New York by 44%.  The Department of Justice has filed suit against New York State for failure to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA).  HAVA provides funding for states to replace lever and punch-card voting machines with more modern and accessible equipment in time for the first federal election of 2006.  

A second paper, "Voting Systems Batch Test Results – Reliability," by Stanislevic and John Gideon of VoteTrustUSA and VotersUnite.org, examines  the results from the recently completed "batch testing" of voting systems manufactured by Diebold, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems, and puts the information from those tests, provided by the California Secretary of State’s office, into the context of the inadequate reliability standards.

The VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project analysis found that federal guidelines would have allowed an Election Day machine failure or replacement every 37 seconds in Maryland, every 23 seconds in Georiga,  and every 78-79 seconds in North Carolina and New Jersey

Joan Krawitz, Executive Director of VoteTrustUSA, points out that “states and counties across the country have been faced with the choice of purchasing new voting machines that are all too likely to freeze, fail and miscount votes, or losing their federal funding under HAVA."

Computer scientist, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, President Notable Software Inc, has observed that:  “The reliability of voting systems can impact election results as well as ballot availability and enfranchisement.”  

Stanley A. Klein, D.Sc, a long-time member of the IEEE Working Group on voting system standards, observes “[t]here is mounting evidence that voting machines are no better than allowed by the standard.  If business computers were as unreliable as voting machines, they would need to be replaced every month or two.”


The situation detailed in the report may take years to improve.  In the meantime, “paper ballot systems offer an acceptable solution since even a failed ballot scanner will not disenfranchise voters. Thanks to medical science, the predicted "Mean Time Between Failures" of a voter is currently over 70 years, and it’s the voters – not the DREs -- that mark the paper ballots. Paper ballots are therefore inherently voter-verified and can be scanned, counted by hand, or both, allowing fully independent auditing. Clearly this mitigates the risk of equipment failure.”