Comment by Michael McClennen (Academic)

I believe this clause to be vital to the success of these standards. Computer systems are, in general, uniquely subject to unpredictable errors, and are vulnerable to deliberate corruption as well. The consensus among software engineering researchers is that there can exists no metric or methodology by which all errors can be eliminated from a given computing system, and that therefore all systems must be assumed to have undetected errors. Given this, software independence of voting results is an absolute necessity for preserving the integrity of our voting system and thus of our democracy.