Slashdot Mirror
1.9 Billion Digits: Brazil's Bid For Biometric Voting
MatthewVD writes "Brazil is on a massive fingerprinting spree, with the goal of collecting biometric information from each of its 190 million citizens and identifying all voters by their biological signatures by 2018. The country already has a fully electronic voting system and now officials are trying to end fraud, which was rampant after the military dictatorship ended. Dissenters complain that recounts could be impossible and this opens the door for new kinds of fraud. Imagine this happening in the U.S."
Finger Print
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
Brother Jeb Bush, and friends ring a bell?
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for the government to gather fingerprints of all its citizens "for their own good". After all, election fraud is bad...almost "It's for the children!" bad.
Of course, a smarter government would find a way to require DNA samples, rather than simple fingerprints, "to prevent election fraud".
Even Diebold makes ATMs. Our online banking systems are pretty damn secure. Not hacker proof of course, but pretty good.
So then why is it so damn hard to make a *secure*, paper-trail-producing and recountable voting system?
This is a fucking easy engineering problem, compared to the kinds of digital financial transaction systems we've already built. Why is it so hard to make a viable electronic voting system?
I think I just heard Rachel Maddow's head explode.
... should have a tinfoil hat.
Like recounts help anything at all.
Awesome, no more half wits that fraud their way into office. Screw you Bush.
The article refers to digits as in those things at the ends of our hands, not numeric digits. So, the actual amount of data will be far bigger than 1.9 billion numeric digits. Nothing they can't handle, of course.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If that's the case, I'm sure every park visitor at Disneyworld now has their fingerprints automatically added to an FBI database
Well it would certainly end all the dead people from Chicago voting.
But then if you did have a dead person show up at the polls it would be the opening of the Zombie war.
Everyone fears technology. But when was the last time you left your smartphone home?
Exactly.
Thanks for including that in there. Most of us were going to do that anyway, but now we won't have any of those "Hey Idiot, this is in Brazil, not America. The Constitution doesn't apply there" comments and the brain-dead road that goes down. Huzzah!
My scathing critique:
What about people without fingerprints?
Are burn victims disenfranchised?
Mobsters will just cut off people's fingers and use them to vote.
Mythbusters proved that fingerprints are easy to fake.
Bam.
Busted.
Who are you, Roland Piquipaille? Trolling for page hits? Slashdot readers don't need to be shepherded to draw conclusions. This is not 5th grade. Christ, Editors.... EDIT !
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
as soon as gene therapy perfects the Immigration Delay Disease this is gonna be awesomesauce
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
now the mafia will cut off fingers when they want to fraud...
The problem of today's representative democracy are the representants and the long cycles of civil citizenship actuation. If I should have the power to change that, I'd go for direct democracy with descentralized, geo-located, crowdsourced governing system. Something along the lines of a Dictatorship of technology with FLOSS and collaborative process of curation and bug reporting of coding and building pipelines. There I said.
My MD5 hash suggestion was only about anonymity...not secuity. Securing it seems would be done with standard-issue security techniques.
A wise man once said: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Btw, I, as a brazilian, must say that the quote "Imagine this happening in the US" was VERY offensive to me.
Oh, and english is not my native language, but come on, the topic is just wrong: "1.9 billion digits" does not make sense.
I am a poll worker, and my precinct uses electronic voting machines. The thing most people don't realize is that very, very few elections are close enough to trigger an automatic recount. In my state, the votes have to be within 1% of each other for a recount. Since the 1800s, for example, only 3 senatorial races in my state were close enough.
If you want to optimize the accuracy of an election, you need to focus on the vast majority of races that aren't recounts. To spend all your time and effort building the perfect system for recounting is, as they say, to make the perfect the enemy of the good. People on slashdot, especially, trumpet the advantages of a paper ballot, because it can be recounted.
Let me tell you the problems with paper. Paper is not a nice medium to use to count anything. It gets torn, smudged, creased, turned around upside down and backwards, lost, and sticks to other paper. Marking is difficult, even if done with a physical machine (hanging chads) or with a scanner (in the Illinois primary, the ballots wouldn't fit into the feeder unless they were trimmed 1/16th of an inch.) Don't even talk about markings done by hand.
If you want to count something accurately, you use a computer to do it with. No one expects that if you have a spreadsheet sum 3,000 integers 10,000 times in row that you will wind up with a different answer. Do that with paper and people, and you WILL have a different answer -- lots of them.
Computers are also easier to use than paper. They have an interactive interface. They can ask the voter to confirm their vote. They can change the size of the typeface on the fly.
So, if you want the most accurate vote with the best experience, you want a computer, every time. Now, on to the hard problem: how do you tell if the computer is cheating? Well, you don't need paper to tell if a computer is broken; you just need a reliable QA test. Black-box testing is the heart of modern software quality control. We don't insist that our accounting programs print us a receipt for everything. Why do we trust accounting software, but not voting software?
What's needed is to bring the same quality assurance controls to electronic voting machines that we do to accounting programs. Let people have their interactive GUIs, let the poor poll workers have a system that is proven to count accurately every time. This is what would optimize voting for the vast majority of races.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I mean, like, the answer is right there in the summary:
now officials are trying to end fraud, which was rampant after the military dictatorship ended.
So, ironically, it seems that Brazil had a better democracy under a dictatorship.
Plus, any real South American country should have a military dictatorship anyway. There's just something missing without one.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If the emissions leak from the voting machine then anyone can see who you voted for and this could result in people changing their votes. You also have to consider that it might be possible to hack these machines and change votes as well.
Or anywhere else, for instance.
Sure, the U.S. can take my fingerprint.
From my middle digit.
(The captcha for this comment was "repent." Amusing.)
1) Here in Brazil, mostly everyone trusts the e-voting systems.
It's much much better than the paper ballots which used to end up in rampant fraud in smaller cities, since corruption is widespread. With the e-voting system, the only possible fraud is if the federal government wants to rig the elections (and does a *very* good job at it) neither the government or the opposing parties consider this an issue so, unless they're all colluding with each other (which would make the elections pointless anyway), I think it's reasonably safe. I actually worked for a year and a half in the IT dept. of the Elections Branch in my state and, with that knowledge, I trust the e-voting system.
2) No one here really cares about providing personal data to third-parties. It's common to have to provide your RG (ID card number) and CPF number (something similar to SSN) at a store, when you're making a regular purchase such as shoes or a t-shirt. When designing any sort of IT system to store clients, etc, the CPF number is usually the natural primary key.
Most people here think it's reasonable to collect fingerprints and no one cares when, for instance, the US consulate collects our fingerprints when we're getting our US Visa. Almost all our government documents (we have several: ID Card, CPF, "Voter's Card", Driver's License, Passport) have tons of personal data and fingerprints. This is a non-issue here.
3) People here care about privacy only inside their homes. For instance, everyone (including me) thinks it's a good idea to install more CCTV cameras in some areas to stop crime. In some places, crime is a much more pressing issue than expectation of privacy in a public place. "Big Brother" reality shows are the top 1 programs on public TV, so I would say the next generation might even not care about privacy in their own homes.
The rest of the world is very different from the US - just keep this in mind.
"Having an electronic election doesn't help or hurt election fraud in this case, however it does remove a few hundred (thousand?) people involved in counting/reading ballots, each of whom could be corrupt."
It's more efficient, now only ONE person needs to be corrupt to swing a ballot, not a few hundred thousand.
Is that better? Is it better if Jeb Bush can rig the election *without* paying Choicepoint to compile a bogus list of Democrats to remove from the election roll?
So better than a completely unverifiable system, but worse that a paper ballot which is 100% verifiable.
"nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud."
No, why would you have less than 100% verifiable system? If you know paper printers are necessary, by putting them only on a FEW machines, you've simply signalled to the fraudsters which machines to leave with valid votes. The actual paper audit trail requires you take a verified paper trail of *everyone* then *after* pick the random selection to sample.
The reason for picking the random selection afterwards, is that nobody can know ahead of time which machines can be rigged and which not. But by having printers only on some, you've broken that condition and made it easy to fake.
Well for me its Jack Johnson or John Jackson, there is no chance to get an honest guy in the congress.
We enrolled almost 150M in a 18 months in UID/Aadhaar. 180M is just the testing phase for a MASSIVE program. By 2018 UID will have covered almost all of the 1.2 Billion Indians and we are capturing all 10 fingers, both irises and a high resolution photo of every India deduplicated and verified. Now that is Massive.
http://www.paul-robinson.us/index.php/2008/10/25/the_robinson_method_a_really_simple_way_?blog=5
Still, that would be too easy.
(Cue idiots on Slashdot who can't even grasp such a simple concept as this, poo pooing it...)
Good for Brazil. At least they are trying to advance the machinery of democracy. In this "great experiment" of ours in the United States the macroparasites have so co-opted the government that we can not hope to have even a serious discussion about electronic democracy. The extension of the theory of democracy cannot be explored. Where has it been mentioned? We have 310 million people and no one is theorizing about the evolution of democracy? It is supressed by the familiars of the macroparasite in the media. They just love what we have already - a system so ancient and creaky that they can just about do whatever they want to the American people in order to make a buck, or two, or a trillion. The idea that a handful of people in the Congress of the United States of America has the right to make the most egregious mistakes imaginable when dealing with the vital affairs of the American people, but the American people themselves have no right to make and correct their own mistakes through electronic democracy--that they are some kind of mindless mob in the aggregate--undermines the very idea of democracy itself whether it is representative or direct. If you argue that representative democracy is correct, you argue that direct democracy is correct, for it is the democracy that is modified by the words "representative" or "direct." They are mere colors of the same thing. Does not a coat perform the same function whether it is red or green?
E Proelio Veritas.
what a stupid thing to say. fraud has been part of the structure of U.S elections for at least 12 years or more. eVoting is automating the process. elections are just a show
The brazilian electronic voting system is a lot better than paper. The system is not online, every voting machine has a USB that cannot be removed before the election, or the machine will be considered void, members of different parties supervise each machine. At the end of the election the machine is sent to judiciary authorities (much less corruptible than executive and legislative members), they confirm with the supervisors if the machine is ok, an if yes, they put the data in the system.