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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.
how do you say "pregnant chads" in Portuguese?
I hate sigs.
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 ?
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.
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.
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?
The bar is set pretty high, so unless each question can be answered, electronic voting is a poor solution.
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.
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
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.