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.'"

Comments

The Weak Link Should Be Eliminated.

[twitter]

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.