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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:
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.
Actually it's only one line - but it's a line of Perl.
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.
Randomize the buttons so that the order of candidates changes every time, store the order in a table.
Forgive me, but that sounds like a VB programmer idea. Anyway, Sao Paulo state had about 1000 candidates for congressman. Are you sure putting them in the screen in with no preditable order would help anyway? It would only happen to make large lines in the voting precintes!
In Brazil every party has a 2-digit number that identifies it. For executive candidates (president, governor and mayor) they use the party number. Senators use 3 digit numbers, federal congressmen use 4 digit numbers, city counselours and state congressmen 5 digits, being the first 2 from their parties.
When you enter the numbers, the voting machine shows their name, party and a picture, because Brazil still have lots of illiterate people. Besides the voting machine's buttons are large and have the numbers in Braille for the blind, along with a audible feedback.
Touch screen with the name of the candidates? Bah! This is unnecessary excess of technology and source of problems.
So say we all
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
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.
"Ooooh, and without a paper trail, how do you prove that you did in fact vote, if your salary payment is suddenly stopped? Something tells me that mandatory voting may be the law, but it is not enforced."
I worked in the elections ( I was drafted..) and can tell you how it works. The person who comes to vote brings his 'Voting card' (lacking a better translation for Titulo Eleitoral), presents it to a person of the voting staff (like me) who checks in a list if he is scheduled to vote in that area. After, and only after, he votes, he gets a 'voting certificate, which is a small stub that can be detached from the area close to his name in the list.
The person voting is required to sign the list, and this signature is checked against the signature in the voting card. If there is any doubt in the identity of the person, we can request further prof of identity (ID card, driving license...).
This list is sent from the central voting tribunal to each election region, which is divided in smaller 'sections'. In my sections there were approx. 400 voters. More or less 90% appeared, the others probably justified for not voting in other sections.
And just to make another point: every political party is entitled to have a person checking the voting procedure, in each section. I had 2 people (one form each party) looking over my shoulder almost all the time.
And they cheked when the disk with the voting machine results was removed from the machine and placed in a sealed envelope . And they further followed the guy who took the disk to the central processing center of the Electoral Tribunal.
Apart from the software side, the process if very difficult to
be tampered.
"Science is common sense with peer review"
Source. So, kindly, please stop talking out of your ass. I know you love bashing Microsoft, but at least try to be sane and sensible about it, k?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --