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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.'"
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:
Mobs are more than happy to let themselves be manipulated. Then they can give free reign to all that's socially unacceptable but that they really feel like doing, because the responsibility does not lie on them any more. See, they are being *pulled*. Recently, it looks like people are too tired to even switch their brain on, so they fall back into mob mode very quickly indeed.
I've had enough with the "I'm being manipulaaaaaated!!11" excuse. Grow a fucking spine and admit that you do what *you* want to do.
Global warming is a cube.
More preciscely unless you plan to eliminate all errors that could affect the kernel running in the voting machine (impossible for either linux or windows kernel) the battle is between the eyeballs trying to find bugs that might affect voting and the bad guys trying to make bugs that affect voting.
In an election situation there are just TONS of correlations between voting patterns and the state of the voting machine (how quickly people select options, how busy the machine is, how warm the machine is etc.. etc..). The bad guys just need to pick one correlation to use in their attack. The eyeballs need to look for every exploitable correlation making their job very very hard.
This asymetry means that it is more efficent to raise the barrier to inserting the bug in the first place by using code that doesn't accept third party patches than to try to find the bugs once they are in there.
Of course the right kind of OSS kernel would be even better, e.g., minix (I don't think tannenbaum accepts 3rd party patches) or some other closed development community but between linux and windows here windows wins for all the reasons that make it worse other places.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
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 ?
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.
If memory servers, the first voting machines here in Brazil were ordinary 386 PC's with no operating system, it booted with the voting software. I don't know for how long this model was used, anyway. Maybe it was just the first prototypes.
So say we all
"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." You seem to forget how easy it is to hex-edit and such. Pirates hack copy-protection far more sealed up then MS software, and all they are is a set of random people trying to give out free warez. A true conspiracy to hack the vote of a whole country is NOT going to be stopped by hex-editing vs. C editing, and while dark spots in the Linux kernel maybe hard to pick apart, a compiled window kernels is near imposable. So would Linux be better? It probably doesn't matter - if it's going to be hacked, it's going to be hacked.
Great Intellect...
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.
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.
In Brazil you can vote if you are:
* between 16 and 18
* over 70
* illiterate
* blind or otherwise disabled
And you must vote if you are between 18 and 70 and literate.
The numbers do add up, if you consider that the groups for which voting is optional are not required to register as voters. So, the number of voters is in no way directly related to the number of people over 15.
First, the population estimations are the ones that are probably wrong. Brazilian electoral data is very accurate (it is even used to check fiscal data).
Now, the hight turnout is because most brazilians (the ones between 18 and 60 years) are oblied to vote.