Linux On Brazilian Voting Machines, the Video

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."

Comments

frightening and horrifying

[circletimessquare]

if you make voting more complex, you increase the number of attack vectors. and where previously, you might need to have a conspiracy of multiple actors to dispose of/ falsify paper votes over a length of time and with grueling effort affecting only a fraction of precincts, now, one well-placed guy, and one fine tuned hack, can in 3 milliseconds massage the votes in such a way that they defy auditing, statistical analysis...

do brazilians really want brazilian democracy to be this vulnerable to a major challenge to its legitimacy?

i find the prospect of electronic voting to the single most greatest threat to democracy i can think of today. because it undermines the legitimacy of the process. you can't make it transparent AND secure at the same time: these two processes are diametrically opposed to each other. either its secure and opaque and therefore untrustworthy (oh, you're going to trsut some underpaid government technicians with the legitimacy of your democracy? "trust us, everythign is fine"), or its transparent and open to more avenues of mischief. and electronics, unlike paper and pencil, are fundamentally opaque. its a black box: you put votes in, a tally comes out. within that black box is too much potential for easy mischief ranging across the entire vote of millions of people in mere milliseconds. of course you can do mischief with paper ballots. its just that the time and effort required is humongous compared to what one little quick hack can do

it is absolutely absurd to me that anyone would entrust the perception of the legitimacy of their government to electronic voting. every democracy, from the poorest, to the richest, should use paper ballots and ocr. that anyone would seriously consider electronic voting, to me, belies a fatal inability to understand what the role of transparency and trust play in the legitimacy of your democratic government, a fatal inability to understand the whole point of what the voting process is: it must be absolutely clear to the people of a democracy that their vote counts, and that their vote is real. you don't get that with electronics

its mindboggling to me. what does it take to convince technofetishists that the voting process must NOT be "improved"? for the sake of the perception of legitimacy of your government?

strawman

[circletimessquare]

it is not required of me to defend the american system in order to attack the brazilian system. please, by all means, attack the american system if you want, i am not defending it, i agree it sucks in many ways, most definitely with the disgusting electoral college. if you reflexively attack the american system when i attack the brazilian system, this is just kneejerk tribalism on your part, you completely miss the point: my words of criticism of the brazilian system are not being spoken as an american, or a japanese, or even a brazilian. this is not a soccer match. i am simply, as a human being who wishes democracy to remain as airtight as possible, imploring everyone to stick with paper voting, not just in brazil, but anywhere democracy flourishes

that the system gives a print out means nothing. if i ghost write statistically invisible records across a wide swath of a vote, covering perhaps 1-10% of a vote, i can sway the entire election on close calls. what will the paper printout protect you from then? you are going to call everyone back and compare each and every record to find the discrepancy? good luck

and you point to how the system is robust. robust against what? a script kiddie? say i am a powerful interest: petrol, agriculture, whatever. the vote looks like it is going against my financial interests, i can see $100 million in losses if a new administration comes in with a new policy. so i am willing to put $10 million up to bribe the right government official, or two (as opposed to hundreds of officials with a paper vote to affect the same volume of changes: impossible to remain an airtight conspiracy). then i hire the 1 right top level hacker programmer to plug in at the right moment at the right spot to ghost write and cover all our tracks and in such a pseudorandom way as to defy statistical analysis

i've just bought the brazilian presidency

only with electronic voting is this scenario possible to happen, and remain absolutely silent and unnoticed

this doesn't bother you? you don't see how this scenario is impossible with paper voting, simply because it requires too much effort by too many actors to remain unnoticed and affect that much change?