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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!"
till the electronic voting has at least the same safegards as manual voting.
With manual voting people oversee people. Not perfect but at least if there is wide spread corruption the knowledge of that corruption at least leaks out somewhere.
With the electronic voting, it is in its infancy and there is easily the ability to implement a corrupt system with far less chance of being caught.
Its not that computers are less accurate or less reliable that people- quite the opposite- its just that having fewer people involved means less scrutiny and a greater chance of being able to be undetectably corrupt.
Even if you can check the source code used (which should be essential otherwise you know nothing at all about the systems integrity) you can't be guarenteed that that same source is the stuff used on the day.
Basically i wont be surprised when we find out that a government somewhere was in power for a decade or more winning every election only to find that the elections were a scam.
Ok there are plenty of scam elections now but we can see for ourselves that they are rigged.
That's not quite like that Dynedain. Voting should not be mandatory. How can a democracy be a *real* democracy if people are required to vote? But that's not even my point. The point is that Brasil is a third world country, a poor country and a country where most people does not have good education. This is a very dangerous thing, since poor people "trade" votes for, say, a pair of shoes. Sure, electronic ballots are good prevent frauds, it speeds the counting process and such, but it is *not* that kind of a miracle. What good is to have electronic ballots if the people is almost un-educated? I'm brasilian, I'm voting tomorrow and I really hope that things change. (I think my english writing illustrates how badly educated we are :)
What kind of penalties are there for non-compliance?
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
And the voting is like in France: if someone doesn't win with a certain majority, the two best go to a second round.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
This would be bad to have in the US, because it'd just give people (and candidates) a false sense of completion with even more confidence than the current system does; remember, the President is elected by a few hundred people that the actual voters select (it was meant to be done by the Electors' names, not by the candidates' names for whom the Electors would most likely vote), and this selection is much closer to the inauguration than the voting-in of Electors. Remember, no matter what any computer says, there is not a President-elect until the Electoral College has met.
Your'e required to vote. Otherwise you'll incur the penalty, which is either a 100 Boliviano fine(exchange rate $1 = 7.2 Bs.) or a day in the local jail, your choice.
It does achieve the goal of high turnouts though - something like 98% of those eligible vote (or at least turn up, get their names crossed off, and vote CowboyNeal).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Ah, C'mon. The system is reliable? Maybe, but it is not trustworthy (and don't come with that UNICAMP evaluation crap). Read the previous post where a reader lists the requirements of a good electronic voting system, and judge for yourself if our system provides that. How can i be sure that my vote was not associated to me? The code is open? Really? All of it? (no). The TSE says that it can't open the source of some code because it is copyrighted, so please, require that the electronic ballot use only software that could be opened.
I would like *all* ballots to print votes, and some ballots be selected by chance *after* the election to compare physical and electronic results.
I work in the elections (3rd election this year), as a "mesario" (the person who guides people to vote, for those unfamiliar with the system), and I can assure you that "people is the most vulnerable part of the system" is very easy to say, but the problem that the system is difficult to use to old people is not a people's problem, but a system's problem. Was there *any* usability study on the design of the electronic ballot?
I could go on and on, but I worked the full day for free for the elections, having to deal with 80 year olds that are not required to vote but still do anyway, to participate in the democracy (which I think is nice), but can't figure out how to use the electronic ballot (first usability assumption made incorrectly by the TSE: people do read what is on screen. They don't!), and then I come home to read slashdot, to read that the system is nice? Nice piece of sh*t.
The really nice thing about the brazilian elections is the logistics, of distributing ballots everywhere (midle of the jungle, midle os the swamp, northeast, everywhere), and then bringing all floppy discs (yeah, 1.4MB floppies! What happens if it gets CRC errors?!) back to the counting places.