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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!"
Good thing Brazil has such a good voting system! It's unfortunate about all the corruption that goes on in third world nations that makes things inaccurate, such as in the recent election in this quant little place called Florida.
...and a paper ballot! The presence or absence of an 'X' or a check, in a human script, is fairly incontrovertible. If counting takes 3, 4 days or a week, it's well worth it.
We all have seen that "chads" are fussy things, prone to hanging. And we're hip to the fact that bits are very evanescent things.
Reaching for democracy is a worthwhile pursuit, worth some pencils, some paper, and a little time.
I have that problem,too, but taking a couple of Tums usually does the trick.
Sigs are bad for your health.
If you don't like Babelfish, use Google's translation service: ballots are made by Procomp,, made by Embratel, http://home.uol.com.br/...
how do you say "pregnant chads" in Portuguese?
I hate sigs.
Actually Brasil is suing fox for that certain episode of The Simpsons.
And start fixing ours. Seriously, our elections are as crooked as a three dollar bill. Now even third world countries are using electronic voting, while we, a technologically advanced nation, have to contend with 'hanging chads.'
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Electronic voting would be nifty, but how do you audit the components and the source code? I imagine something like the slots in vegas. Wouldn't want to have some crafty developer inserting a special backdoor would you?
The more you know, the less you understand.
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.
In January, the mayor of Rio threatened to sue a weather forecaster who predicted, wrongly, that there would be storms on New Year's Eve. The weather forecast kept crowds away from one of the biggest festivals of the year.
Do we have a trial-lawyers exchange program with them?
our elections are as crooked as a three dollar bill.
I've often wondered if this phrase will change later this century. We gained a Two Dollar Bill in 1976. I wonder if we'll get a Three Dollar Bill in 2076.
I then have to wonder what happens in 2276. I guess re-create the Five Doallar Bill and repeat the phrase with a Six Dollar? Perhaps, but what happens in 2176? "As crooked as a 5 dollar bill"? D'OH!
(assuming we're around that long, of course. Look at Rome...)
I guess I'm not taking inflation into account either...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
The issue of voting scams can be minimized with the following steps:
1. Before anyone votes in a voting booth, they have have proof of identity, preferably a picture ID.
2. Require that during election time the voter can ONLY vote in one voting jurisdiction, no exceptions allowed. That way, people who live part of the time in one part of the country and part of the time in another part of the country cannot vote in both jurisdictions, which is a great way to cause voter fraud.
3. Use a ballot that all the choices are marked off by a small ink stamp. With an ink stamped ballot, the ballot can be read by both hand and machine counts easily.
I'm sure there are more steps available to lower vote fraud, but these three steps ends the vast majority of voter fraud problems.
Nice to see an article about this, as I often say it in voting discussions. (I'm Brazilian)
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
I believe people over 16 can also vote with parental permission.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
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.
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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.
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).
How many VPN exploits are there? A man in the middle attack would seem to be the best approach. If we conduct man in the middle attacks against banks laundering drug money to support Columbian presidential elections, why would we not make a direct attack to insure our guy gets elected in another South American country?
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
When I've raised this before, I've found that many Americans have been horrified. Freedom of speech is the highest goal. Suppression of the press will lead to dictatorship.
Guys, get real! Stopping the press saying one specific thing for three or four hours is the tiniest suppression of civil liberties. It's a much bigger and more basic civil liberty that the whole country should have a level playing field for voting. Most other democracies do this and haven't turned into dictatorships yet.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
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.
I can see it now:
Announcer:It appears the winner is a "I 0wn J00z" of the "All your base are belong to us" party.
Burma?
There are many possible attacks on both paper and electronic voting systems. The advantage I see for the electronic ballot is that it's much easier to audit in very large elections. Hire a few competent, honest, programmers and they will detect fraud much faster and more reliably than an army of people counting and recounting votes could.
With paper voting no one sees but a very small part of the total. A totally electronic system is much more visible. How many votes can someone count? A few thousands, at most. About 0.01% of the total in Brazil. With open source electronic voting (which, BTW, is NOT what they are using in Brazil), anyone would be able to see the source code and look for abuse all over the country.
...and, after serving an eight-year suspension, he's running for Governor of Alagoas now, and has a more-than-zero chance to get elected. GAAAAAA!!!!
The bar is set pretty high, so unless each question can be answered, electronic voting is a poor solution.
Due to the high illiteracy rate in the Northeast, campaigners would hand out a R$5 bill, with a card containing a candidates picture, and the numbers required to vote for that candidate (no names, text, or anything else). The most frequent complaint of fraud was that they did this during the morning of the election (not allowed), not that they were essentially paying for votes!
The other problems that occured were that some areas didn't have access to electricity, that some voting machines got stolen and were never turned in, that some (idle)threats were made against those that voted a certain way. It appeared, though, that the electronics worked pretty well, at least none of them "blue-screened".
Personally, I'm opposed to the idea of electronic voting, because there is no hard-copy to use as "proof of vote".
I worked for TSE (higher election court), responsible for the elections. I've seen the development of the computer ballot system.
I can tell you all, brazilians and everyone, else that the system is very good. Aside from some failing hardware which accounts for up to 3% of total computer ballots, we have a very highly reliable system.
The most vulnerable part of the system is still the voters. In some places people really trade votes for shoes, money, promises, glasses, food. It's a shame. Our politicians diguised their ruling through ignorance on a "democratic" talk of opening the system for everyone, including completely uneducated people. They are the most influenciable ones cause they also are the poorest. The politicians knows it and keeps them uneducated so they can't escape this vicious cycle. This is our most shameful problem.
But with all this problems we still have one of the most efficient voting systems. Counting starts almost immediately after the end of voting. No one cam manipulate the votes. There is a high degree of cryptography applied in the system. No single party or group knows the algorithm and the keys at the same time. Only a handful of people know the keys, to be precise.
Perhaps the best assurance of the reliability of the results are that the TSE needs to have a perfectly clean and fast system. This happens cause the work this court does, aside from preparing the elections, could be done by other courts. Judgement of election problems could easily be done by normal justice channels. But the very good levels of satisfaction with the work done by TSE (and all lower level election courts) makes them immune to the constant attacks on its existence. Make a bad move and say goobye to all that power and visibility that a position there can get.
After this somewhat extensive reply I would like to say that people from other countries cannot imagine the real dimensions of our elections: 115 million voters, 6 president candidates, thousands of candidates for other positions (we are voting for 6 positions in total). It's like 5 or 6 elections in one. And we do not want to have the really shameful example of the USA where two president candidates admited frauding the elections. Our system make it impossible here. And for those that do not trust anything, we are introducing a printed paper copy of the voting, obviously not revealing the voter. Anytime you can go there and verify if the printed votes represent exactly what the computer ballot system says. And the voter look at the printed copy, can confirm it's what it was inputed and, if all ok, just press Confirm and the printed vote is kept at the ballot automatically, with the electronic one computed. For the paranoid, the software used, including the sources, was seen by computer experts hired by the political parties. Let's say that all the precautions were taken in account.
For all us brazilians, good voting. For the others keep looking, we are doing a good job here.
My interpretation is that he found that the massive undercounting of Al Gore's votes was a predictable artifact of the machines chosen and the ballot layout.
If a partisan person, who knew about this defect of the machine, was designing the layout of the ballot, they could take advantage of this flaw to skew the election results.
The world doesn't hate us becasue we have so much. But many in the world envy our power. It's the nature of anyone or any organization with power--expect envy and antipathy. I have traveled abroad (Asia, Europe, Latin America) and have felt it personally--though very rarely in Latin America. I know what it's like to be acosted on a subway, or when walking down a street, simply for the fact of being an American. I've seen my friends called 'black devils,' have been personally called 'an American bastard' a 'white devil,' an 'American pig,' heard 'Yankee go home,' etc. And it was hard for me to understand until I realized how simple the answer really is--jealousy. Plain and simple.
The US is such a behemoth that it can never tread lightly. If we move in any direction, make any sound, the world recognizes it. That makes us clumsy sometimes--and always does it reveal just how powerful we are. Were I a citizen of another country, it would have to seem ghastly sometimes. "My God! Who do they think they are? You just can't do that!" But, rightly or wrongly, we can. There isn't a square inch of this earth that we can't touch, and a very small action or operation, in our eyes, is viewed as huge in the eyes of others--precisely because it would truly be a huge endevour by them to do so, even if it were possible. Say, for example, parking a couple ships in the Indian Ocean and launching some missles at bin Laden back in '99. For us, no big deal, a morning's work and then time for lunch. For most other countries, not even possible or, at least, would be a huge operation. (I was jumped in an alley for that one). But now it's my turn becasue I'm back in my beloved, imperfect, sometimes garish, sometimes crude, but always beautiful and truly miraculous nation.
Europe, not too terribly long ago, 200,000 Muslim men, women, and children were butcherd just a few hours away from Rome, Paris, and Berlin while you did *nothing*. The US--on the other side of the Atlantic--finally said "that's enough" and did something about it. Only then were you all too glad to join on our coattails and try to salvage some dignity. I have friends there right now still fixing the mess in your backyard. Arabs are safer here, in the US, than Jews are in Europe. Germany and France contributed to the building of nuclear production facilities in Iraq and then condemned Israel for blowing it up when you lost your paychecks for it. The US spent thousands of lives fixing your fucked up politics for the 2nd time in 20 years, then spent 100s of billions of dollars propping you up after WWII--including it's former enemy countries. Then, while sipping your wine in safety and leisure, you swindled GIs on the streets and, to this day, talk of how garish and uncouth we are. We maintain a nation of thousands of square kilometers, between the two largest oceans in the world, with every religion, ethnicity, and culture imaginable within it, while the EU can't agree on the color of shit and won't even consider letting Turkey--a very deserving nation--into the most basic of government alliances, much less the EU.
Middle East, why does your elite insist on going to the West for education, medicine, and science instead of building it there? Why do you say the West is condemning you to poverty when the obvious recipe for economic prosperity is a vibrant democracy? Name one rich country that isn't democratic! Why are your monarchies--a wicked and vulgar form of government--never critisized by *anyone* in the Middle East or Arabs living abroad?
Asia, with the notable exeptions of Singapore and Japan, get some transparency in your governments and financial systems. Much is being done in this vein and it's encouraging, but along side of this, please bury your hatred for one another. I live in the States, where I've seen it action, people from different Asian cultures can and do get along. Koreans can date and be friends with Thais--Japanese with Taiwnaese, Vietnamese with Indonesians. Please make it a concious effort.
Latin America, you are my brothers and I love you (much of my family is Latin American, and living there). But don't try patronizing the US on cultural grounds. You have much to be proud of, but your culture is not inherently better than ours--or anyone else's, for that matter. Yes, tractor pulls in the US don't point toward an enlightened culture, but banging drums and blaring trumpets at a tennis match doesn't either. And, if you are going to be fatalistic about your governments' fraud and inefficacy, be prepared to accept the consequences. Especially in a democracy--people generally get the governments they deserve.
Now back to my crass, uncouth, and beautiful American life. I think it's time for a cheeseburger and horse trough full of beer. I love this place.
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.
More than mere navel gazing.
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.
Marcelo Vanzin
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!
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Louisana has electronic voting machines and we lent many of them to Florida. They were returned when Edwin Edwards won.
In Brazil, I'm told, the truth will set you free. Because of this the Ministry of Inofrmation and Central Services have been in power for years. You never know when some terrorist like Buttle will fix the machines and make them lie.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
True. Only for president. But declaring absence is kind of a pain...
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
The US government hates Castro because he kicked out their puppet fascist, Batista, and made it hard for US corporations to use Cubans as near-slave labour.
Americans hate Cuba because of a several decades of relentless propaganda from the US gov't about how evil Castro allegedly is, and how he's an "evil communist dictator". Of course, they don't don't mention how equally bad Batista's government was.
What's that W. Churchill quote? :Googles:
l
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time."
http://www.quotegarden.com/government.htm
No dude! That's Los Angeles!!!