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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. [...] For some reason, it seems to be this is a form of pushing the nation into voting *for someone*.
1) A nullified vote means you made a mistake picking a candidate. This "mistake" can be delibered or not.
2) If you are not willing to participate (considering that voting is mandatory in Brazil), the voting machine has a "blank" button.
3) The voting machines have the "blank" button since the first prototype in 1996. Actually, the design of the voting machine hasn't changed much since then.
4) The blank vote has always existed, since the paper ballot and it has the same effect of nullified votes. But the blank votes were the fraud source in paper ballots: some dishonest vote counters would fill the blank votes during counting. Believe me, that happened much often than you can imagine. With voting machines, that's impossible.
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