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Electronic Ballots In The Brazilian Presidential Election

Posted by timothy on from the press-31-to-return-to-the-main-menu dept.

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!"

4 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. wow, great! by I+Want+GNU! · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:wow, great! by dirvish · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, it is disgusting how rampant corruption is in some third world countries. In some places a powerful family will control elections making certain that they remain in power for generations. It is even possible for a president to sucede his father and for brothers to retain power at the same time despite gross incompetence.

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      FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
  2. not without failure by selderrr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 ?
  3. Electronic Ballots?? by rat7307 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    Burma?