Electronic Ballots In The Brazilian Presidential Election

jorlando writes "On Sunday (06-Oct) Brazil will again use electronic ballots for its Presidential Elections. Since a lot of /. readers from time to time talk about the pros and cons of this type of technology, it's a chance to see how it perform well (at least in Brazil...). Representatives from NGOs, ONU and foreign Governments were invited as observers and to see a working electronic votation system in a huge scale, since there are more than 115 million of voters in Brazil ... usually the results of the election are given 4 hours after the closing of the ballots (17:00 Brasilia -3GMT), with a small margin of error, since only 98% of the votes are computed in 4 hours ... some ballots are in places (mostly in far-away rural areas and in the Amazon region) that need to be taken to larger cities to be connected to the vote-download system ... ballots are made by Procomp, the comunication sytem is a VPN-like made by Embratel. The election can be accompanied by the main Brazilian notice sites (http://www.uol.com.br , http://www.estado.com.br, http://www.globo.com and others), mostly only Portuguese, so use the fish!"

Comments

Other translation...

[beebware]

If you don't like Babelfish, use Google's translation service: ballots are made by Procomp,, made by Embratel, http://home.uol.com.br/...

Re:Spanish-accented, thick-mustachioed conga dance

[bernardos70]

Actually Brasil is suing fox for that certain episode of The Simpsons.

Interesting thing......

[Dynedain]

Brazilians are required to vote.

Probably results on a lot less confusion from infrequent voters, and a lot easier to setup and verify people on an electronic system.

not without failure

[selderrr]

in belgium, we've been using electronic voting for quite a while now. Results are a lot faster, but queues at the booths are longer too because older people are a bit frightened and take their time to figure out what to do (even though it's as straigthforward as pussy : find the hole of a person that you like and fill it :-)

the system itself is not without failure though : one one district, the right-wing, fascists-in-disguise-party was not on the screen of the voting computers (I can't imagine that this could possibly be a programming mistake, since all other districts worked without flaw and used the exact same software)

last note : even here, only something like 30% or so of the votes are electronic. Next federal election, due in 1 year, is supposed to lift this percentage

Some stats from the BBC

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC has an artice and a photo

Some quick stats from the article:

115.2m voters
Voting compulsory for over-18s
406,000 computer ballot boxes
Polls open 1100 GMT, close 2000 GM

How it works (clarification mark III)

[Banjonardo]

sorry about the many posts. It works as following:

1. You enter a number (The numbers are under every poster of every candidate. Vote 22!)

2. The person's picture comes up.

3. You press OK or CANCEL.

It's pretty easy cause a lot of people can't read.

Nada new under the sun

[Begemot]

Costa Rica did it 5 years ago with AT&T. It was based on quite interesting technology called Byzantine Quorums. The goal was an effecient replication of the same info over a network. The idea is that you don't have to copy the data to all participating nodes, only to a Quorum... (The name Byzantine comes from much earlier "Byzantine Generals" problem).

Electronic Voting in India.

[The Cydonian]

I guess this will attract all India-bashing trolls out there, but electronic voting has been a common feature in the last few Indian (both federal and state) elections. (All elections in India are conducted through a disinterested regulatory body called the Election Commission of India). Most people widely welcome the use of Electronic Voting Machines; there have been lesser instances of rigging and booth-capturing after their deployment. Besides, there's been a cost-effectiveness as well; suddenly general elections have become cheaper.

Oh yes, EVM's are being used in the ongoing Kashmir elections as well; since the Kashmir issue is highly emotive (and consequently, irrevocably factionalised) for most people, I'll refrain from commenting on the EVMs' effectiveness there. But yes, the response in most other places in India has been positive.

Wrapping up

[vanza]

Well, since there seems to be some frequent doubts about our voting system, I'll be wrapping up some of the responses from others. I'm Brazilian also, but I won't be voting on these elections.

(i) This is not a new system

This isn't the first time we're voting electronically. We've been doing this for some years now. It started only in the bigger voting places (like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), and (I can't remember exaclty when) has been extended to (almost) the whole country since the last (2 years ago,, mayors an senate) or second to last (4 years ago, president, governors and senate, just like this one) elections.

Not all votes are electronic. There are some remote places where I'm not sure if it's already electronic, and also votes from Brazilians that reside out of Brazil are still done using paper ballots (AFAIK) and, thus, counted manually. Those are generally the cause the we do not have the final result until the next day (or 2, sometimes), until all the votes arrive from other countries.

If you want to see what it looks like just go to this site and click on the title (light blue, "Teste seu voto online com candidatos fictícios"). It's a Java applet that looks like the voting device. It's slow as hell, but you can get an idea.

(ii) There is a paper backup system

When you vote, your vote is stored in the memory of the voting device, and also printed and stored in a bag attached to the device. In case there are doubts regarding the device, or if it fails in some way, then votes are counted by hand. But, primarily, all votes are counted electronically.

(iii) Voting is mandatory

Yeah, we are obligated to vote. If we do not vote, we have to say why we didn't. If we still do not say why, we lose many civil rights (as has been already pointed out: we cannot get a job - at least not in public services, etc, etc).

If someone does not live in Brazil (like myself) we have two options: vote in a local Brazilian government building (consulate, embassy, etc) or, when back to Brazil, fill some official forms and show proof that you were not in Brazil during the elections. I'm in the second group, since there are no government agencies that I know of around here in Texas. "Foreigners" are only allowed to vote for president (and not for other local authorities).

Well, I think that's pretty much all for now.

Re:Wrapping up

[rbrito]

I'm posting this right after coming from the elections.

Like Marcelo said (hi there -- send me an e-mail so we can get in touch) this is not the first electronic election that we had (I live in São Paulo, the biggest state of Brazil).

The past election (which was also automatized in the very same way) went quite smoothly, but we had few electing positions ("prefeitos" e "vereadores").

This year, the situation was quite different. Each person had to vote for 6 positions and while the system used was exactly the same from a users' perspective, people (especially the simpler, with lower education or older people, not used to electronic devices) had problems and used more time than expected.

While in the past election it took me about 5 minutes to stand in line, today it took me about 1h15min.

I did see an old lady getting confused in the voting booth and having to "be helped" slightly for she to finish her vote.

The thing that I could observe in practice in this real life situation is that most people do have difficulties trying to deal with electronic devices. All this despite a huge informational campaign and having a so called "intuitive" interface.

This left me with the clear impression that the barriers for a large scale adoption of automation are not technological but anthropological.

Anyway, I guess that this election can be regarded as a huge success given the low failure rates that we had. And, in the end, everything seems to have gone well.

System was not properly audited

[leandrod]

Unfortunately, the Brasilian electronic voting system reliability and security are flawed. Brasilians are trusting it more out of hope in fundamental human goodness and general political progress, meaning sure, no one will attempt electoral fraud nowadays, coupled to general technical illiteracy, than because it was proven good. Because it was not.

Only a few computerised ballots leave a paper trail for vote audit. Many of them run a customised MS WinCE version. There were only five days to only a few accredit technicians from the political parties to audit the whole kabooza. Requests for proper auditing went unheeded by the electoral authorities, which are astoundingly technical illiterate and moreover refuse to educate themselves.

Here are a proven flaw on the self-auditing portion of the system, a first-person account of the absurdity of the audit attempt, and an analysis of some failures in the auditing process. All in Portuguese, use the Fish!