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Linux On Brazilian Voting Machines, the Video

Posted by kdawson on from the eat-your-heart-out-diebold dept.

Augusto writes "Just 10 days ago, 130M Brazilian voters were turned into users of one of the largest Linux deployments worldwide: the 400,000 electoral sections in all of the 5,563 Brazilian municipalities were running electronic voting machines, and the Linux kernel was running in all of them. These voting machines have been used in Brazil since 1996, and are rugged, self-contained, low-spec PCs. We've discussed the technical details of this Linux deployment and implementation elsewhere, but I thought it would be interesting to show some pictures (and a movie) of Linux booting on these voting machines. So I asked for official permission and thus was helped by a technician while I took some quick pictures and made a small movie showing the boot process, where you can actually read the kernel messages."

4 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Free vote by Jabbrwokk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Free software for free votes, what a great match-up. Plus, it beats the Diebold machines running on Windows CE that kept crashing.

    Incidentally, I just voted in our Canadian federal election and we're still using the pencil-and-paper and human-counted voting method. Slower, but still the most reliable and secure method IMO.

  2. Re:Linux is great, but... by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If it's coded properly, open sourced and widely scrutinized, electronic voting would be more resilient than pen and paper voting.

  3. Re:Linux is great, but... by Brigadier · · Score: 4, Interesting

    yea your right, what we need is a bunch of paper, marked in #2 pencil in a box. Yea that is much more secure. not everyone can hack an encrypted voting machine, everyone can steal a box and reprint voting forms.

  4. Re:Linux is great, but... by amorsen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Physical security is something we're really good at. Thousands of years of experience. That doesn't mean that there are no failures, but in general you can at least detect that tampering took place and that it was deliberate.

    With voting machines, you get a bunch of places where candidates happen to win by a 16384 vote margin -- is that deliberate tampering, machine error, or maybe just plain luck? You'll never know, and therefore you'll probably never catch the criminals.

    --
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