Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.