Decoder Ties Do Not Affect the Error Exponent of the Memoryless Binary Symmetric Channel

The generalized Poor-Verdú error lower bound established by Chang et al. (2020) for multihypothesis testing is studied in the classical channel coding context. It is proved that for any sequence of block codes sent over the memoryless binary symmetric channel (BSC), the minimum probability of error (under maximum likelihood decoding) has a relative deviation from the generalized bound that grows at most linearly in blocklength. This result directly implies that for arbitrary codes used over the BSC, decoder ties can only affect the subexponential behavior of the minimum probability of error.