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Linux-Based E-Voting In Brazil
John Sokol writes "I just heard from a good friend and Linux kernel hacker in Brazil that they have just finished their municipal election with 128 million people using Linux to vote. They voted nationwide for something like 5,000 city mayors. Voting is mandatory in Brazil. The embedded computer they are using once ran VirtuOS (a variant of MS-DOS); it now has its own locally developed, Linux-based distro. These are much nicer, smaller, and cheaper than the systems being deployed here in the US. Here is a Java-required site with a simulated Brazilian voting system. It's very cool; they even show you a picture of the candidate you voted for."
Is like this.
Oh well, I'm sorry that you Americans will have to put up with your Diebold chosen masters in the next election... hope it doesn't turn out too bad for you.
From the wiki:
In 2004, Diebold-Procomp decided to migrate to Linux as a cost reduction measure.
Sorry, but mostly machines are built by Diebold who bought Procomp in Brazil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
http://www.samurai.com.br/urnaeletronica/ue2004/view
Actually, in Estonia, there has been web-based elections a year ago. The national ID card has PKI certificates in it and this cryptographically makes it safe. There's more information on the net, ie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
say CP/M still controlling a nuclear reactor , now THAT would be interesting.
Why... It is probably more common then you think. In the US Nuclear Plants are aging and the Liberal Hippies will not fund to keep them up to date, as Nuclear is Bad OK. It is actually quite common to see old computers running Nuclear systems. As they have work for decades and there is no reason to risk a new system that may have problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now where is the link to the source code and how can I verify that it is the code that was really running on the machines?
As a matter of fact, contrary to what Wikipedia says, the source code *is* available. The Ministério PÃblico (something like the public prosecutor in US), the OAB - Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, an organ that congregates all lawyers in the country and any of the political parties can have access not only to the source code but to the compilation, digital signing and installation process. They also can run simulations and test the system for security and fraud and request any ballot to be audited. The whole software and data is also available for 2 years after the election. During the election days, representatives of any party can stay at any polling station to be sure that the election is not being rigged in this point. Personally, I think our system is quite secure and would require a major conspiracy involving basically everyone.
Scientia est Potentia
Wrong, much harder than paper based.
Tampering the elections on a paper based election was really the rule here in small cities. That's pretty easy. One VERY simple method used carbon paper so that the vote for each one would be copied and could be delivered to the candidate as "proof of voting" to retrieve some bucks from him.
Another problem recurrent here in the times of paper: illiterate people vote here. When they had to write down the name of the candidate, it was a nightmare to decipher the vote. It is pretty easy for them to copy some numbers, and they can verify the vote with the pic.
Because banking and voting are different problems. Banking requires accountability (non-repudiation), voting anonymity. There are solutions for both, but anonymous electronic voting that's verifiable while being untraceable is so far unimplemented.
The flexibility and usefulness of paper voting continues to be underrated in these discussions.
Even though I don't think that "our" (I'm Brazilian) voting machine could be much better, I don't think that paper+pen works better.
In the past, when candidate A was part of the government, there used to be a lot of "accidents" with the vehicles carrying the voting papers from locations on which candidate B was known to have a good number of votes.
ilex paraguariensis for all
I should bloody well hope not. Immediately after the rules were changed in the UK, so that postal votes were available to anybody who asked for one, without them having to give a good reason why they couldn't vote in person, a great saga of electoral fraud began. Including intimidation campaigns by thugs - of course, entirely without the knowledge of the candidate in question.
Weaken the secrecy of the ballot, and these crooks will take the opportunity to rig elections.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There are three problems that must be tackled by voting syst m :
1. Anonymity of vote (nobody can tell who I voted for)
2. No third party of trust (I do not need to trust anyone, especially thos organizing the election)
3. Trust of count (The votes are correctly counted and totalled)
There are surprisingly little literature around cryptographic system designed to solve these three problems. All the electronic voting system that I am aware of rely on the revocation of one of these properties.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
All the IP is owned by the Brazilian Government. Diebold is just the assembler with the lowest price.
Not that it makes the machine secure, it is just slightly better than the US situation.
Rethinking email
Some people who work during the elections are volunteers. while others are drafted by the Superior Electoral Tribunal. You can still not go there and do your job as long as you have a strong justification (like not being in the city you vote on the day of election). There is no voting 'in transit' i.e. voting in another city, or in any other 'electoral college' besides your own.
As a compensation, you get a 'lunch ticket' and a letter which entitles you a 1-day off so you can compensate your day working on the Sunday election (just give the letter to your employer, he cannot refuse you the day off, it's part of the electoral law)
By 5:00 PM, no one else can vote. If there is a line, people are given numbers ad only those with numbers in line can cast their votes.
once the last voters finish, the voting system is set to 'closed', meaning no more votes can be computed. at least three paper trails are generated, for three of the people in charge of the voting table. Any one can go there and ask for an extra paper trail, such as me and you. usually, a few people ask for additional paper trails on behalf of their own parties. You can check the paper trail gainst the voters registered for that college, to see if there are any irregularities.
Potentially, a parallel vote counting can be set up, completely contolled by the population, just using the paper trails generated at the end of the election.
The president of the table then takes the machine to the Electoral Tribunal and there they pick up the internal data and do the vote counting.
IMO it's reasonably resistent to tampering, and allow for parallel counting, which makes it resistent to frauds. Yeah, being open source would help for sure, and setting up a country-wide parallel vote counting would be very hard, but it is possible.
I believe the U.S. should just license our technology and be happy with it ;-)
That's not your first e-voting.
That's the second time i worked in the elections, and i must say that since the elections became electronic, we never have problems with scandals or doubts of the results.
Erevybody forgets to say that befero the elections the polling machine prints the name of every candidate and the number of votes they have, in this case zero.
At the end of the election, the machine prints beteween 5 and 10 lists of results. It depends on how many parties representatives wants copies.
I and the others working with me had to sign every copie that the machine prints.
So you still have some "paper insurance".
Well, its not a perfect system, for sure it can be hacked, but so can the ballot system.
Ballots can be faked as well.
I really can't understand why people still have this felling that the paper system is much more secure.....face it, if a goverment really want to fake an election, the system dont matter...it will.
I've worked on Brazil election. The voting machines storage are floppy-based. Each voting machine have a floppy-disk with data designed only for this equipment. When the election is finished, the data are transfered to the floppy-disk, on which it have a void-safe seal, to guarantee it was not violated. And, of course, the data are also encrypted. Then the voting bulletin (with the machine's voting results) is printed in 3 copies, on which one is fixed on the voting section's door, the other two are sent along with the floppy disk in a sealed envelope to TRE (Tribunal Regional Eleitoral) to compute the result. Also, is possible to vote only where the voter is enabled to. So, obviously it is MUCH hard to hack this process than using the old pen&papper. Pen&Papper is VERY VERY EASY to hack. Also, a HUMAN is used to count the vote. Pen&Papper process is lazy, untrustable, innacurate, and ridiculous.
Totally different from the rest of the world.
Actually, it's pretty similar to the rest of the world. Voters are mostly uninformed on the issues and uninterested in getting informed.
Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) is not socialist...
It had roots on it 30 years ago...but this is the same as saying that american democrats are really democrats.