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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."
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".
This is about Brazil, not Cuba. There isn't an inch of Marxism in our government system.
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.
It is because of that anonimity requirement.
Anonimity makes it impossible to make a secure (in the mathematical sense) election. The best we can do is to make the flaws hard to exploit, what is a completely diferent problem from securing an ATM.
Rethinking email
In Brazil the fingerprint is already available to law enforcement. The Brazilian identity card already has it printed on the back
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_identity_card
Until they decompose, dead people still have finger prints. Don't worry about Chicago, they are probably well stocked with cryogenic freezing facilities for the storage of digits, as needed.
And of course, let's not forget that I think the Mythbusters proved it's pretty easy to fake out fingerprint scanners with some putty and a little bit of spit.
The ID Card only contains the Thumbprint, but the card you fill to get the ID, which stays with the government, contains the fingerprint of all your fingers for both hands.
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
Brother Jeb Bush, and friends ring a bell?
The debacle of the 2000 Florida election was because of paper ballots. If it was illegitimate (I am taking no position on this regard), then it proves that you don't need an electronic system to steal the election if there is systematic corruption already in place. 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.
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 removes many who individually could have only a marginal impact on the results while at the same time increasing the size of the "lottery" - such that it is now:
a) Possible for a single invidiual with the right access to corrupt the entire election
b) Do it with much less chance of getting caught because purging an electronic audit trail is a million times easier than covering up physical ballot stuffing at thousands of polling stations
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
A wise man once said: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
The point of that saying is that governments should be easily overthrown (which is actually the entire point of having elected officials. When they start pulling crap like asking citizens to be fingerprinted, you overthrow the government by electing a brand new one. The newly elected officials would then fear introducing similar legislation and then no longer being re-elected. In practice, the people are far too apathetic for the system to work that well, but as Churchill put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.")
Btw, I, as a brazilian, must say that the quote "Imagine this happening in the US" was VERY offensive to me.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can tell you that Brazilians have an unfortunate tendency to be very easily offended for no reason at all. In fact, the fact that I pointed this out probably offended you.
I grew up here in the US, South Carolina to be exact, and all the statement is accurate. You're just missing some cultural background on the American thought process. People here are, in general, very anti-government. All that was meant is that If the federal government suggested fingerprinting everyone here, there would be a huge backlash. In fact, not too long ago there was a federal law passed (the REAL ID Act that would require state identification cards and driver's licenses to pass certain requirements to function as a federal ID card (we don't have a carteira de identidade as in Brazil, there is no federal ID card). The backlash was such that 25 states have passed some type of legislation vowing to not participate in the program. And they don't even require fingerprints, just full name, signature, date of birth, gender, a unique identification number (which was the cause for most of the backlash), address, and a photograph.
There's a lot of things I don't agree with in American culture (like the general lack of interest and trust in science), but I do wish Brazilians would adopt some of the very, very healthy distrust of government.
Oh, and english is not my native language, but come on, the topic is just wrong: "1.9 billion digits" does not make sense.
It's digits as in "digitais". The population of Brazil is approximately190 million, assuming everyone has 10 fingers (or digits), you arrive at that number.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
What it does, whether actual fraud takes place or not, is to open the door to allegation of fraud that cannot be refuted.
I don't know about your country, in mine, every party that participated in the election has the right to call for a recount (at their expense) and send representatives to supervise that recount. Supervising such a recount is trivial. The skills needed by a superviser include being able to identify where a cross has been made on a slip of paper and being able to count paper slips. The average 6 year old should be able to do that with some certainty.
That's not the case with e-voting. It all starts with being unable to tell whether every vote was counted correctly in the first place. Was every vote placed where the voter made his "cross"? With pen-and-paper elections, you have a physical slip of paper that is tossed into the voting bin by the person who votes. The voter goes into the booth, he makes his cross, he comes back out and he dumps a piece of paper himself into the box, under the eyes of representatives of every participating party. The box has been throughly inspected by them all to make sure it's empty before it was sealed, again with them identifying the seal, and they again are there when that seal is broken and the counting starts. There is simply NO way you could possible remove or add any votes illegally.
Not so with electronic booths. Was the "box" empty? And even if, does the box only count every vote once? It's trivial to multiply datasets, how can I know for sure that the code doesn't do that? I can audit it? Let's assume I cannot, like more than 99% of the people out there. Why should I trust you, auditor? Maybe you're in with them and get a ton of money to shut up about their fraud? And how should I recount? I don't even know if the votes you present to me were real because there is no paper slip being tossed into the box, let alone by the voter himself. Did you make dead people vote? Or how do you explain the suspiciously high voter turnout this time?
The problem isn't fraud alone. It's that you cannot simply debunk allegations of fraud easily. Today, you cry foul? Here's the ballots, you can see where the cross was made, you can count, go ahead and check. Your party member has been there all the time and he saw that our box was legit. It's trivial to check either for any person without handicaps. I'd wager about 99% of the voters could easily recount today and be part of the process that ensures that no fraud can happen.
With electronic voting, more than 99% cannot.
And now convince those 99+% that you have been elected legally when the losing parties cry foul and you cannot prove them wrong without reasonable doubt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In Brazil, every single party or entity (like universities, etc) has access to the full source code for the elecion systems, terminals and servers. The code is digitally signed by all those parties and any of them can ask for an independent audit. Random voting machines with printers are also spread out the country. Is there a room for fraud? Of course, no system is 100% secure but so far, no fraud was detected. With so many eyes looking at the whole process, nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud.
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.
We try to do what we can here to help with that. As the summary mentions, we had tons of problems during and after the military dictatorship in Brazil (payed by the US of course) in the 60s to 80s. On the early days of democracy, voting fraud was rampant, since it was the same basic politics of yore, now with a thin veil of democratic participation. Voting, before the fully e-vote system was rampant with fraud, and delays, Florida level of delays.
We tried our best to make the e-vote machines and the election system as secure and transparent as possible, among what was done we have.
So yeah, not perfect, but it is so much better and safe than what we had on the paper ballot days, that noone wants to go back.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
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.
Amazingly enough, the researchers in this field are not completely obtuse.
Often they are, because they miss the most important feature of any voting system: any member of the electorate must be able to verify the procedure. That means that any voting mechanism that relies on complex mathematics is inherently flawed because it means that you're likely to have under 10% of the electorate able to understand it, let alone prove that it is correct. This means that you end up with a small percentage of the population who are, in effect, responsible for deciding the elections.
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In Brazil, every single party or entity (like universities, etc) has access to the full source code for the elecion systems, terminals and servers. The code is digitally signed by all those parties and any of them can ask for an independent audit.
All they have access to is the code that purportedly is being run on the voting computers. But on election day they have no way to verify that the code that runs is the one they looked at and signed.
With so many eyes looking at the whole process,
What you see as 'so many eyes' I see as so few eyes. In a paper election anyone can verify the process and a significant fraction of the population actually does. In electronic voting very few people can verify anything. And in particular none of the parties or universities you mentionned above can do anything to verify that the election is fair.
nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud.
Most people don't claim there has been fraud. However what most researchers in the field and most computer scientists do say is that there is no way to know, that if fraud happens there won't be any proof anyway, and that electronic voting makes the voting process opaque.