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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."
I don't see any of the problems resolved.
You can still tamper with the system and there is no verifiable audit.
I don't know that the underlying choice of OS was biggest problem (if I were building it, sure I'd choose Linux) - there are more fundamental process issues that are at fault. Namely, that someone could tamper with the election and no one could (dis)prove it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
This is great
I do really miss a paper trail, that is needed in case there are doubts of "fraud", we do not want such doubts, do we ?
Crappy software running on linux is just as easy to rig...
the problem with Diebold is political not technical
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
How un-American. Oh wait...
Risk of fraud. Under the current system I can't go out and bribe, blackmail or threaten voters, because I have no way of determining whether or not they voted as I asked. 'Vote for X or I break your legs' doesn't work if I cannot find out whether or not any given person actually did vote for X. But while you can take steps to ensure that the polling booth is private, you can't say the same for an internet terminal whose location you do not know and whose configuration you do not control. For all you know the voter's boss is watching him as he votes for the candidate who will restrict workers' rights and remove regulations on abusive bosses.
The moment there's a way a person can prove who they voted for to a third party, the secret ballot is dead.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The difference is that you trust your bank with your money. You trust they will not steal from you and protect your privacy. You can check that they are not stealing from you.
If you vote on a third party website, you'll trust it with your votes, and its secrecy but, contrary to banks, you will have no way of checking that your vote is correctly accounted for.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
That's fine for you, but one principal of a democracy is that the vote is open and transparent. When there's a vote, I can go to the voting place and control that the process works fine. I can verify almost everything important first hand (at least in Germany, where I live). With voting machines, only a few people in the whole world can control the system. Even if the software is free, there are only few people who understand the source code and can verify it. The vote is _not_ transparent.
Oh, and don't tell me that voting machines are unhackable. Here you can see a voting machine being hacked in 60 sec.
So, you have vs. .
I agree, that elections are not a simple problem, but pen&paper is a simple solution and at the moment the best.
Not sure how this is a troll. It might be too sarcastic, but it points out how nonsensical "if it ain't broke don't fix it" comments are. There are plenty of things that aren't technically broken, but that still could be done a whole lot better.
While I agree that our election is far from perfect, I don't think that pen & paper is the best solution. It introduces many more places where it can be frauded, the accounting, false ballots and much more. A unified electronic voting has many advantages and can be made more safe by adding cryptographic receipts, for instance.
I know that electronic voting can be hacked, but if you raise the bar too high it start to get impractical hacking. Compromising single units can be easy, but if it can be detected later the votes from that machine could be eliminated, so the roms would have to be swapped out after wise also, unless your objective is to create a dos on some ballots.
I trust the system now because of the results it have shown, not because of the system it self, I know it can be hacked, I don't know what the heck is running there, what I know is that it has been shown by the results.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Brazilian cities were able to know the election results in the same day of voting, before midnight.
You mean:
Brazilian mayors were able to rig the election results in the same day of voting, before midnight.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
With pen and paper the accidents need to be a lot bigger and widespread. You need many accidents.
With electronic voting, you only need one accident. All you need is for someone to accidentally insert a thumbdrive. Or accidentally press the "demo key sequence".
It's so much easier to cheat with electonic voting.
Printing thousands of fake paper votes and moving them into the right locations can be done, but it is a lot more work than cheating with electronic voting.
Even if the source code is validated, the results can be easily changed. Without a paper trail you can't check.
If you have a paper trail, you might as well stick to paper and pen.
I trust a paper more then some bits. Can you abuse it and do forgery? Yes, but with paper it is much harder. Try changing my vote on a piece of paper. Then try changing some bits in a PC. Now tell me which one will be noticed first.
This is not about if paper is perfect. It is about if it is closer to perfection then a computer and it is.
The goal is not speed.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.