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E-Voting Raises New Questions In Brazil
Zaatxe writes, "Today is election day in Brazil. About 125 million people are expected to vote for president, governor, congressman (for both state and federal levels) and senator. The Washington Post has some interesting details about the electronic voting machines used in Brazil. From the article: 'Elections in Brazil used to be a monumental challenge, with millions of paper ballots to count by hand, many of them delivered by canoe and horseback from remote Amazon villages. Fraud was widespread, and it often took a week or more to determine the winners. Latin America's largest country eliminated many of these hassles by switching to electronic voting a decade ago, long before the United States and other countries... Some computer programmers who have closely examined Brazil's system say... confidence is misguided... Some Brazilians are lobbying... to switch from Windows CE to an open-source operating system for the voting machines, since Microsoft Corp., citing trade secrecy, won't allow independent audits to make sure malicious programmers haven't inserted commands to "flip" votes from one candidate to another.'" Read more below.
As a Brazilian voter, it was a shock for me to see that the voting machines here are made by Diebold. But what makes me confident in the system can also be found in the article: "Given the choice of picking a system where wholesale rigging is easy, versus one where it's impossible, why has Brazil gone with the system where it's easy? Brazil did build in some safeguards during its transition to electronic voting — protections that still don't exist in the US. While the code behind Microsoft's operating system remains secret, independent auditors must approve of the overlying voting software before it is inserted into the nation's 430,000 machines. The software remains open to inspections for three months before election day. And hours before the polls open, randomly chosen voting machines are tested 'to verify that the software inside does what it is supposed to do.'"
As a Brazilian voter, it was a shock for me to see that the voting machines here are made by Diebold. But what makes me confident in the system can also be found in the article: "Given the choice of picking a system where wholesale rigging is easy, versus one where it's impossible, why has Brazil gone with the system where it's easy? Brazil did build in some safeguards during its transition to electronic voting — protections that still don't exist in the US. While the code behind Microsoft's operating system remains secret, independent auditors must approve of the overlying voting software before it is inserted into the nation's 430,000 machines. The software remains open to inspections for three months before election day. And hours before the polls open, randomly chosen voting machines are tested 'to verify that the software inside does what it is supposed to do.'"
India has been using an EVM for a while, it has no operating system and is a bare-bones equivalent of a calculator with a line printer attached. Hook it up to a standard dot-matrix printer and get voting. It is probably as simple as a system can be.
No government which outsources its technology to vote can remain soverign. Machiavelli didn't go on and on about mercenaries, for nothing. And all said & done, this doesn't actually mean an honest election brings up a good government - we're intelligent induviduals, who form dumb mobs, pulled & manipulated by politicians with electoral issues (which are non-issues in the real sense).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I find it's somewhat weird that one can't directly vote as "null" (this means, in other words, you're refraining yourself from participating). In order to vote as "null", you have to pick an invalid candidate number. It's been like this since the last election (or maybe before, but I can't recall). There's apparently not much press on the fact. So I guess most uninformed people (majority, as usual) would simply do otherwise just thinking "they've done something wrong". For some reason, it seems to be this is a form of pushing the nation into voting *for someone*. Call me paranoid, but I can't see a good reason for that. It reminds me of that quote: "if voting worked, it would be illegal".
And yes, I'd rather not participate. There may not be any evidence of fraud in our elections, but I don't see the point in participating in the circus of lies that is politics in Brazil. If after all these years no one has realized politicians (right/left wing, doesn't matter) aren't out to help anyone there, they well deserve what's happening now.
The soul of South America lies within Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina.I mean on the surface it would seem that this is a perfect opportunity for them to sell more hardware and make more money.
The only explanation I can think of is that they are afraid their buggy voting machines will give different counts than the paper ballots. Despite all the worries and fuck ups with Diebold machines people won't really believe that the machines are problematic until they can see they screwed up in a real life situation. Sure there were a couple incidents where a machine started counting backward or people fucked up but this doesn't necessarily seem any more serious than the flaws in paper voting and after all these problems were caught.
Yes if problems are caught there are probably others that aren't but it doesn't have the same PR effect.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Frankly I think the concern about using an MS OS rather than an open source OS is misplaced. In fact despite my general dislike for MS I have to say that in this situation MS is probably a better choice than a Linux based OS.
Sure people are going to claim the 'lots of eyeballs' effect makes linux more secure. However, there are major sections of the code that are deep vodoo and very very few people understand. An attacker would of course choose to put his code in one of these sections and if you are really running this code atop a full blown OS and you know (because the government has demanded it be published) the software that will run on top of if there are probably tons and tons of innocent looking ways to screw with the results.
I don't know if this would really work but one might imagine a situation where the ballot will be divided into two pages. Likely whether or not the vote was recorded and sent to permanent memory before the page is flipped or after will have some statistical difference in memory reservations or paging or some subsystem like this. One could code a race condition that scrambles the cast vote which while rare is slightly more statistically likely to happen in these situations than the other ones. Hell in an election often the young have different voting patterns than the old so you could just have some statistical relation to the speed at which options are picked.
The point is the bad guy is likely to have lots of resources and be able to concentrate them in one very small area of the code in a way that looks valid or if discovered innocent. The eye balls need to look over all the code. Yet we know from the number of bugs found in the linux kernel that many bugs do make it past without even being engineered to like innocous.
While the MS kernel is likely to be more buggy it is much harder to contribute a patch to the MS kernel making it more difficult for a bad guy to slip the code into the kernel in the first place. So while it would be nice if the kernel was visible to everyone I think not accepting third party patches is a more important security feature than being open source for a situation like this. Getting someone hired as part of MS's OS team or corrupting one of them is way harder than getting a patch acceted to the linux kernel that delibrately contains a very subtle area.
Of course what they really should be doing is not using anything complicated like a real OS anyway and instead an EVM.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Why do they need access to the OS code to determine whether the voting applications are fair? Surely some auditors could be given access to the relevant codebases (presumably under an NDA) to ensure that the code accurately records votes, and that once those votes are recorded they cannot be altered?
the development of the system, and all the intelectual property associated, belong to the electoral justice.
when the system was first develop and used in capitol cities in the 90's, procomp (one of the manufacturers hired to develop the system) was not a diebold subsidiary yet. the other two were Itautec (subsidiary of the 2nd largest private bank of brasil) and Unisys.
all the intelectual property developed by the 3 companies was transfered to the union.
since the IP belongs to the government, they can choose to hire other comapnies to manufacture the units in the future if they son choose.
What ? Me, worry ?
Randomize the buttons so that the order of candidates changes every time, store the order in a table.
When a button is pressed run a lookup on the table and increment to count for that candidate.
Send some text to a line printer with details of the vote.
Repeat untill end of election.
Have a button inside that dumps the vote count out to the line printer.
That's going to be a few hundred lines of code at worst, surley it doesn't take that long to pick up any bugs.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
No candidate reached 50%+1 votes, so we will have a 2nd round with the two leading candidates.
Yet, the leading candidate is the current president, whose government was swamped by all sorts of scandals -- the most recent being that members of his campaign's staff were arrested while trying to buy a (probably forged) dossier against the main opposing party's candidates.
In any decent country, such a man would not have reached the end of his term. Compared to Lula, Nixon was a saint! But here, reached the point where tons of people seem to believe honesty is not relevant to a politician. Or maybe they don't bother looking for it because they believe it's impossible to find...
Circumcision is child abuse.
The machine is in constant evolution, but some of them aren't very good, and I belive the machine is loosing it's safety guards. The original machine had a system read-only for the operating system, now it's stored on a SD card, still it's locked with a seal, and when election os over (by the way the election was yesterday and all results are already out) all machines are verified to see if there wasn't any violations.
It's possible yes, to compromise a voting machine, but doing the same for a dozen of them is really hard. The transmassion system is still hacker-proof, mostly because Brazil is very advanced at digical certification and have a good understanding of security in this area. This is the weak link on the chain, but still, after voting the regional and national data are matched often, so if you hack a transmission, it simply will appear, as will exist a difference in numbers.
All in all the system works pretty well, the operating system on the machine really dosen't matter much (even the I like it to be linux instead of winCE), and most contries around here in south america are already adopting it, I hope others with fraud problems (did I'd said USA?) will turn to at least learn some lessons Brazil already know.
I wonder if some of the concern by the critics is that the software running the voting machines is opaque, and owned by a US company. US involvement in South/Latin America is quite a politically sensitive issue and the US has historically used covert and military actions to influence politics in the region. So I'm not suprised there are concerns - even if misplaced - over the MS software.
Imagine if there was a borderline vote in some US states and the voting machines were running a closed software package from a country that had potential influence and something to lose or gain over who got elected.
I can imagine concerns might be raised in the voting areas by some people.
Well, I worked with that machines and I can say they are secure. They dont have any output with external world, like ethernet and others kinds of communication. The votes are stored in floppy disks, with a big seal. If the seal is broken, the votes cant be official. But the seal is big and hard to damage. I believe today we have a great vote system, because we have the results in 13 hours after the election.
Please note that not only left-wingers are against intellectual property. A lot of libertarians and classic-liberal conservatives also oppose it on the grounds that IP violates private property. The reasonig is basically as follow:
"Thy should a 3rd party tell me how I should use the xerox machine I own, the paper I own, the powder I own, and the book I own, in the way I choose to? Why should a 3rd party forbid me to resell whatever I made with property I possessed? After all, who own these things? Me, or that shadowy 3rd party, that exists as such only because the government created and sustains pro-monopolistic, anti-private-property laws?"
The only way a right-winger can defend IP is by giving up on the private property principle and adopting utilitarianism. This is what, for example, the Ayn Rand Objectivists do. Which is the same as saying:
"Yeah, we know IP is a violation of privarte property, that it's something that can only exist because it's state-sponsored, and that this sponsorship also goes agains the doctrine of minimal government, and also that this makes us inconsistent, but IP is usefull anyway due to 'x' and 'y' and 'z', so we're for it."
Needless to say, I'm a conservative, I sympatize with libertarianism in many aspects, and I'm against IP.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I might be worried that some left-wing nutjob in Brazil would nationalize that source code and fork in a "fuck the yankee imperialist capitalist" move that Latin America loves so much.
You are american, right? You must be, because you show little knowledge of foreign politics. Sure, Latin America has its share of "left-wing nutjobs", like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But that's not the case in Brazil. We also have our left-wing nutjobs (and one of them ended in third place in yesterday's election) but they seldom achieve anything important.
About the "little respect for forign IP in the past", it didn't matter if it was foreign or national, it was a question of public health, which should be one of the top priorities in any government. AIDS strikes harder on poor people, and the pharmaceutical industry doesn't seem to be willing to spread the return of their investiment for too long.
And just for you to know, the Minister of Health that made this move was a center-right wing politician (which by the way won the election for governor in Sao Paulo, where 1/4 or Brazil population lives).
So say we all
You always had to pick a invalid number since we started using eletronic ballots here. 0, 00, 000 or so on will do fine.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Some years ago, those who distrust e-voting machines managed to put into votation in the Brazilian Congress a proposed law who would require 10% (yes, only 10 percent) of the machines to come with printers. The idea was for those machines to print two copies of the vote: one for the voter, who would have confirmed his vote, and another to be put into a sealed urn by the voter (who would be able to check whether the printing was correct). If doubts arose on the results of an election, those urns could then be opened for manual counting, and if big differences were found between these 10% of printed votes and the full results, the election would be cancelled and redone (probably with paper balots).
A sound idea, don't you think? But, guess what? Yeah, the law wasn't approved. And as a result, there's absolutely no written proof at all of what or whom people actually voted for.
Also, there's a law around that forbids independent research of voting intentions to be spread in news some days before an election. I'm not sure whether this law is being enforced right now, but the official reason behind it is that such researchs "interfere" in the voting decision of the people. Now, just imagine what this means: e-voting machines registering "votes" that cannot be traced, plus voting researches disallowed days before an election. Yes, you're right: if someone that was far behind in the voting intentions got elected, it might be alleged that the people changed their mind between the last allowed research and actual election day. How can you argue against it? You can't.
This is the recipe on how you can build a dictatorship that has no appearance of being a dictatorship. You don't need to be violent. All you need is to put some clever technology into it, and you're done. Government becomes a permanent ownership of you and of your associates. After all, who said that multiple "competing" parties aren't really a single entity with lots of names, existing only for the people to believe they have choice?
In the last two presidential elections (2002 and this 2006 one), all the four presidential candidates were from left-wing parties. There's a range: from soft left-wing to extreme left-wing. But it's all left. Different parties, or single-party with four different names for you to "choose" from?
Who knows?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
India has been using an EVM for a while, it has no operating system and is a bare-bones equivalent of a calculator with a line printer attached. Hook it up to a standard dot-matrix printer and get voting. It is probably as simple as a system can be.
Between the printer and the input device, that setup sounds far more complex than a mere slip of paper and a pencil.
I was told by a voting-booth clerk that it was easy to identify which 2-digit president's id was entered by anyone in the keyboard by just listening to the different sound each keypad key would produce. No anonymity at this last Brazilian election if you had a clever clerk.
all these countries, including the U.S. that are having electronic voting issues are being used by less democratic nations to prove that democracy is bad. Slashdot is playing right into the hands of people like Kim Jong Il, and Hugo Chavez (yeah I know he was democraticaly elected but he has since legislated the country to the point he can't lose again". one thing that might help though it may be unpopular is a voter ID card if done right it could help alleviate the most blatent human issues, such as voter fraud. If not done right could become a source of discrimination. another issue that is getting out of hand is either party automatically screaming voter fraud every time a candidate loses a race, then sending in hordes of lawyers to try to prove their case. oh well what do I know.
I'll tell you this: if you had a treatment for a terminal disease and I needed it but couldn't pay your extortionate price (most of which is to cover profit and marketing, research on drugs is third on the list of expenses) I'd fucking shoot you, your wife, and your dog if I had to and take it. And I'm quite sure you'd do the same if the positions were reversed, cunt.
With it, even Microsoft-run boxes are safe from everything short of a fire or other paper-ballot-tampering.
Without it, the most open-source system may still be vulnerable to a subtle bug.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Doesn't seem to add up with the percentage of their population under 15 years of age (30% according to that website).
Even if it's only somewhat off:
THAT'S A HUGE VOTER TURNOUT!
HOW DO THEY DO IT?
Wrong, wrong, extremely wrong! The party of the ex-Minister of Health, newly elected governor of the Sao Paulo state, Mr. Jose Serra, from which our former president, Mr. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is also a member, is the PSDB. What "PSDB" means? It means "Brazilian Social-Democratic Party". Yes, social-democracy. Were it not enough, Mr. Serra was one of the left-wing exilees who departed Brazil on 1970's when our (this time correctly named as such) right-wing dictatorship was hardening.
It has been some 20 years since Brazil had an actual right-wing politician in power. That's why many people nowadays, unaware of what "right-wing" really means, call these soft-left politicians "right". They don't know better.
By the way, they also don't know well what "extreme right" is. They think our dictatorship of the 1960's and 1970's was of the extreme right, when it was far from it. The actual Brazilian extreme-right, the fascists of the Integralist Movement, were crushed by our right-wing dictatorship much in the same way the extreme-left was crushed. And what was this "crushing" anyway? Around 15 deaths per year (little more than one per month) for 20 years: the lightest dictatorship of the whole XX century actually.
Pay no attention to this disinformation on what PSDB is. It's soft-left, democratic left, but left nevertheless. The most "right" thing we have these days is the PFL, "Liberal Front Party". It's hardly more than center of the center, and is crashing anyway, having lost a lot of power in the 2006 election. The future of Brazil is to be fully left-winger.
Too bad for Brazilians. We'll suffer a lot and won't know why.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
People shouldn't be fooled by the parties names in Brazil. And as physics say, it all depends on your point of reference. Inside Brazilian politics, PSDB has a slight right-wing bias. They wouldn't join forces with PFL (the most right-wing party in Brazil, among the ones that deserve attention, in my opinion) if they didn't have a right-wing bias. If you say that all parties are left-wing, you are contradicting yourself. After all, if they are all on the left, there is no sides, therefore, no left or right to consider. "Center" is half way from the leftmost wing and rightmost wing.
So say we all
You mean that a broad, automatic, transparent tampering, is difficult because it requires the tampering software to be concealed ? The fact that it would require to hire a few competent and dishonest developers surely doesn't make it secure enough to use it in any serious election.
Also, why do the ballots move to the counters where counters could go themselves to the preccinct ?
Stop thinking that democracy is a complex thing to organize. When one can have an army, one can have a voting system that is reliable and fast. I wouldn't say inexpensive, but since when do we discuss budget when we talk about Democracy ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I believe that one can program an off the shelf point of sale system to do a vote count without much effort. You don't even need to write any software. Just get something from Sharp, NCR, Citizen, Canon, or any other of a whole zoo of commercially available POS machines. Also, anyone that can do: "Ya'want fries wizzat?", can then run an election, but that would be real grass-roots democracy and we don't want that, now do we?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You are making the assumption that the Linux base used for a voting machine would be getting updates from the 'real world' distribution. There is nothing that says you have to use outside code after you start developing. In fact I can't imagine any project manager who would accept any outside code once the OS base had been selected.
Electronic voting machines are all about eliminating variables. The only variable in the system should be the the candidates.
The biggest objection to Microsoft is that you are working from code that is doing things that you don't know about. In addition Microsoft isn't going to give you an explanation either...
Someone here mentioned that HEX code wouldn't be more secure. If it was as large a bloated as a higher level language that might be true. The hole in that argument is that large monolithic code by its very nature has all sorts of hidden surprises. Small machine/assembler code programs don't have fat to hide surprises. Why do we need a huge fat GUI for a voting system? There are much easier and secure ways to do this.
The basic problem with every part of this is the logical flow of the overall voting process hasn't been analyzed in an open forum to break the problem down to the most basic, simple, and secure process.
There is no law stating that 50%+1 null votes would block candidates from running the next election. This is purely an urban legend.
they elected Maluf,Collor and 15 guys directly envolved into corruption schemes in the power again :/
maluf is like a black hole,hes unoficial motto is "he steals but does it",but he steals a lot and do little,its probably that he stealed close to 300 million of dollars from são paulo city alone
Collor is a former president that froze all the accounts in brazil and then cleaned em,like the "ultimate hacker" XD
...Too... many... ellipses... in... summary...
The reason for using a vanilla F/OSS operating system is that it will, for the reasons described by the parent, be unlikely that it's corrupted specifically for the purpose of throwing an election. The voting application should only make generic use of the OS services so that it is less likely that an unknown or little known weakness of the OS will be exploited or exposed. Other than Diebold's unwillingness to expose the source to their voting machines, the main problem with them appears to be simply that they're way too complicated... all that you need is a screen that presents the candidates and a button beside each candidate's name, which has to be pressed long enough that it can't be an accident. And counting software at the other end, which should be manageable using any competent database app.
Less is more.
all the intelectual property developed by the 3 companies was transfered to the union. ... they can choose to hire other comapnies to manufacture the units in the future if they son choose.
That's nice but your software is not the problem, using Wince is. People have shown how easy it is to physically break into Dibold systems, but that would not matter if there was decent code auditing in place. Your chances of getting that to work with WinCE are about as good as Dibold's. Bill Gates will have something to say about the ownership of WinCE and how it works, so it might be easier to start from scratch than transfer your source code out of that black hole. The ease of hacking into WinCE is another giant problem you won't have with other software. You can only trust a system as much as you can trust it's weakest part, regardless of what company builds the rest. The effort required to secure WinCE would be like rewriting the OS. It would be easier to start your code from scratch with an OS that works.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Lenin, after the Communist Revolution in Russia, strenghtened the property system in his NEP policy. Why? Because that way he would be able to get tons of money from international capitalists. When he gathered enough to make the revolution completion possible, then he eliminated private property.
Your argument is weak. No left party in history avoided making alliances with what they consider to be the right. The Brazilian left-wing parties are no exception. And in regards to social-democracy, don't forget that its banner is to bring socialism by way of political reforms, not of political confrontations, which necessarily means alliances with forces "in the right".
In regards to the names left and right, yes, you're correct if we think of Brazil only, because there're always two "extremes" and a "middle" no matter what the range of possibilities is. But I'm thinking in terms of the worldwide political spectrum, not the local one. The whole of the local Brazilian political spectrum is a subset of the global one, and a subset located into what, on the global scale, is commonly called "left". That's the point. Something as the British conservatism, or the the American one (which is center when compared to the former), are nowadays devoid of any formal political representation in Brazil. There's simply no conservative party in Brazil at all. And as a result, what we have of most "right-wing" here are some parties without any ideological identity, with no philosophical basis for their beliefs and actions, and with zero militancy. How "right-wing" is that? None.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Most part of all this discussion is based on wrong information: the operating system of the Brazilia voting machines IS NOT Windows CE. It is VirtuOS, an old DOS like operating system... I have read and discussed about Diebold voting machines before on my blog (http://macarronada.blogspot.com/2006/09/voting-ma chines.html#links) and I understand that the process and hardware of the Brazilian machines are much better than the AccuVote-TS for example. They are simple, but better ( just remember: K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid). Just see the tests Princeton University professors did: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
Whether a null vote win requires all the previous candidates to drop out of the next race, I don't know. But it is definitely not the same as the blank vote.
By the way, it might be of interest to some /.ers that not only is voting in Brazil mandatory between the ages of 18 and 70 (if I remember correctly), but so is polling-station duty. It's like jury duty. Yesterday my girlfriend was the "president" of her local polling station in Rio. Looks like she'll be back there in a few weeks for the runoff. Even worse than jury duty, however, is the fact that poll duty is for three consecutive years.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
That's some serious bullshit, and I keep hearing it. If you want to bitch about the fact that he froze the accounts, I'll be right with you. However, he didn't "clean" them. Everyone got their money back with above-inflation interest.
If you don't have access to the source code of the voting machines, you're giving up control of your election to a private party. A small group of people at that company will give you some numbers to tell you who won, but you'll have nothing but their word on it. On a smaller scale, anyone who knows a security hole can crack a particular voting machine. Most polling precincts have at least some honest people. Or if not honest, at least they're split into 2 or more camps that watch each other. But with a centralized, secret system, how many people would need to be bought off? A few billion dollars can buy a lot of people that would be honest if they had less power and temptation.
Opposite to what happens in most of the United States, people in jails now or people who were convicted before can vote. The advantage is that we don't have the disenfranchisement of anyone just like it happened in Florida. Other advantages of the Brazilian system is that elections are always on Sundays and that you need to be registered to vote, so 1) the election officials know exactly how many people will vote in any voting place and 2) it's almost impossible to vote twice without document forgery.
The design and the source code of the Brazilian voting system belongs to the Judiciary power (the one who controls how elections are made, not politicians, like in the USA), not to the companies that developed them.
A friend of mine was sick of not getting any information on the Diebold voting machines used in our municipal elections, despite many freedom of information requests. So he's running as a candidate to make it (and other democratic imperatives) an election issue.
We need more people willing to do that.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Just because the default Windows OS isn't secure out of the box doesn't mean that it can't be made secure. It's a pretty trival matter to lock down a non-networked Windows workstation and make sure that it only loads a single application when it boots. As long as the application is secure and the voting machine itself doesn't have any publicly accessible floppy drives or USB ports then it's good enough.
... one seems to get the impression that no matter that the problem is, it's caused by Microsoft and will be fixed by OSS.
We know its you, Bill.
You just can't mistake...it. I think it makes...for a much more interesting...and intriguing...article when everything is split up...by strange punctuation. Especially since...it doesn't appear to be quoted. So I have to wonder...why the elipses?
Also, some "smart" candidates used to run with names or aliases like "Branco" (Blank), or even common swear words like "puta", "viado" et alii (@ that time you could cast your vote as numbers or written names/nicknames)
Many of them got even elected.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
large parts of it are offered in source code form.
Microsoft's Shared source initiative is not free software and won't help anyone improve anything. First, you don't have all of the source, so the Trojan is still hidden. Second, you can't modify it and share your changes. The first problem negates the freedom you would have if distribution was unrestricted anyway. The "customizations" they are so proud of, therefore, are no better for security than changing the wallpaper on your desktop.
The results are typical of M$ junk. "ActiveSync, TCP/IP and 802.11b Wireless Vulnerabilities of WinCE", "The exploit is triggered by viewing the malicious MMS message", " FrSIRT Security Advisories - Citrix Program Neighborhood Agent ... Note : In order to exploit these vulnerabilities the Program Neighborhood ..", and so on and so forth.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
that's why our ballots are not connected to any kind of network during voting hours
They don't have to be to give faulty results.
and they have several physical security measures as well, like tamper proof locks, seals and intusion sensors.
Those kinds of measures have been easily defeated.
if those are violated before vote counting begins, the ballot and all it's votes are voided.
That's all it takes, sometimes, to throw an election.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.