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In a Blow To E-Voting Critics, Brazil Suspends Use of All Paper Ballots (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In a blow to electronic-voting critics, Brazil's Supreme Court has suspended the use of all paper ballots in this year's elections. The ruling means that only electronic ballot boxes will be used, and there will be no voter-verified paper trail that officials can use to check the accuracy of results. In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy, Brazil's Folha De S.Paulo newspaper reported on Thursday. In so doing, the justices suspended a requirement that 5 percent of Brazil's ballot boxes this year use paper. That requirement, by Brazil's Supreme Electoral Court, already represented a major weakening of an election reform bill passed in 2015. Speaking in support of Wednesday's decision, Justice Gilmar Mendes equated proponents of voter-verified paper trails to conspiracy theorists. "After the statements made here [by those who defend paper votes], we have to believe that perhaps we did not actually reach the moon," Mendes was quoted as saying. "There are beliefs and even a religion around this theme."
Which means the person truly in power already bribed the programmers of this online voting system.
The US landed on the moon, not Brazil, so score one for the paranoid side. E-voting is also known to be a terrible idea, so one more score of the paranoid side.
Because after one bored asshole in his mom's basement decides to elect himself president, they will be rubbing their assholes and wondering what happened.
No verifiable paper trail... voting stations already proved to be easily hackable... what could possibly go wrong (for the people, that is)
Electronic ballot boxes are safe and tamper proof, and in other news: vaccines cause autism, the Earth is flat and I have found a cure for cancer.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Electronic elections are not auditable - but it can be worse.
I'm definitely against the electronic voting though. Especially in light of the fact that lots of those are closed source solutions, and many of them were shown to be hackable.
The fact in the matter is - once you have paper voting, performing fraud is so much harder then changing some numbers.
When I make a vote on a paper with a ball pen, it's nearly impossible to change it without a mark without replacing whole box. If someone gives me a tablet or a computer. How do I know that when I click my vote was marked correctly? Without me personally inspecting the code, then inspecting the hardware, I can never be sure.
Some sources: http://thehill.com/policy/cybe... It took hackers _minutes_ to hack into several different voting machines, and once it's modified there's really no way to prove the vote was different.
Apart from the obvious "ok they're crooks and they want to be able to rig the election electronically with ease" what are the legitimate arguments do a system like this? Serious question, I come from Germany and live in Britain now, It's always occurred to me that paper votes work quite well.
Just a reminder that Republicans are fighting every initiative to require paper ballots in the US. Even in the rare red state where a paper ballot initiative has been put forth by a Republican lawmaker, the state party has fought it and they only passed with the full support of Democrats.
http://humphreyonthehill.tnjou...
https://www.cnet.com/news/repu...
http://www.governing.com/topic...
You are welcome on my lawn.
They're smart men, so I'd opt for corrupt.
How are proponents of voter-verified paper trails the conspiracy theorists when the other side has
the crackpot conspiracy theory that "paper trails pose a risk to ballot secrecy"?
I have no problem with electronic voting systems but they all should print a receipt for the voter
and that receipt should be deposited in a ballot box before the voter leaves the building
which solves both problems nicely. No conspiracy required.
Paper or Electrons, it doesn't matter how the people cast the votes, they decide nothing.
the people or electrons that count the votes, decide everything.
Thats why, if I want to "vote", I write "pay to the order of" on a little slip, and give it to a ROTUS, SOTUS, or combine those to temporarilly sway a ROTUS or SOTUS of either HOTUS to my cause.
The only slips of paper that matter in any election say "in god we trust" or "pay to the order of CASH".
Even the SCROTUSES that sit on the SCOTUS and interpret the COTUS for the POTUS and VEEP can be rented, for a modest fee.
Another country lining up to play "Who wants to be a vassal state?"
Sad.
Talk about fixed elections ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They put Lula in jail but forgot to make him ineligible. Now forecasts tells he should win by a 10% margin. It was high time to make sure the people's vote would not be taken into account, hence electronic voting.
No need to worry about your preferred candidate ever losing again! No more nasty anarchists, white supremacists and putin lovers causing problems. Never have a Trump, ever again! The only thing wrong with democracy is the voters and this neutralizes them perfectly.
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this â" who will count the votes, and how.
He was referring to a Communist Party vote, but the same principle applies.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
So because Brazil decides to go completely electronic voting that somehow invalidates the arguments against election technologies that provide an actual physical audit trail?
Having no physical audit trail simply means the government will be telling you 'just trust us' after they announce the election result.
Ken
For the people commenting that now the elections will be rigged etc, please notice Brazil has been using e-voting machines for 20 years, that boat has sailed a long time ago.
I prefer the electronic voting, it is a lot faster to vote and get the results, and it is not like paper voting is any safer: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/wo...
The best reason to go electronic is to avoid pressure on voters. People used to "sell" their vote for pennies, the ticket from paper voting was the proof they voted for the buyer.
"In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy."
The justices are right about one point, E-voting has complete ballot secrecy. The ballots are so secret that nobody knows if the ballot count is accurate.
This is a presentation given by a google engineer about using encryption to verify paper ballot elections:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I highly recommend watching because it's in depth but also tackles general election security. I don't know that this can be applied to electronic voting though.
If there were three completely independent vote counting systems managed by 3 completely independent organizations that would be a reasonable measure against tampering. If there is a discrepancy for a given voting station then you could take either the two counters that agree or the average count. If the systems are way off, you could invalidate all the votes at that station and have anyone who voted at that station vote again.
So either these Brazilian justices are incredibly stupid, or incredibly fucking corrupt, take your pick.
The lack of a verifiable paper trail, and the fact that the machines can be easily hacked (as demonstrated in the USA by researchers), is absolute proof of the above.
...require a thumbprint which is associated to the person's legal documentation (birth certificate, drivers license, green card, etc) to make sure they are voting legally, and I'm all for it.
So Brazil has decided to go papertrail-less on voting, how strange, I wonder why. Could it be perhaps that in such systems systematic tampering is impossible to prove after the fact & very unlikely to be detected at the time. No, the Brazilian government are all honest upstanding people who would never stoop to such. https://www.bbc.com/news/world... On the other hand...
This is not a blow to the critics. It is a blow to democracy in Brazil.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Fuck that noise.
1) In-person vote fraud is on the order of a few dozen votes out of billions cast. Voter ID is a solution in search of a problem.
2) The cases voter ID proponents point to invariably wouldn't have been prevented with ID's. Convicted felon? Voted in person and by mail? Have residences in more than one district or even state and voted in each? Not prevented by ID!
3) Voting is a right. You do not have to show ID to enjoy your rights. You don't have to show ID to enter a church. You don't have to show ID to be entitled to a lawyer. And skip complaining about the 2nd Amendment when it uses the words well regulated and not individual ownership.
Voter ID is about suppressing votes from people who tend not to be conservative. Nothing more, nothing less.
Where people hacking your voting machines within 90 minutes is apparently only a conspiracy theory:
http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/...
I guess you believe in the easter bunny and the security of E-Voting?
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Repeating an argument that was just debunked is a sign of cult thinking. Go look at your own link - it's replete with duplicate votes, petition fraud, felons - NOT. PREVENTED. BY. VOTER. ID.
Undocumented immigrants aren't going to be voting because they don't want to bring attention from the state. Green card holders are going to have regular drivers licenses, so your precious voter ID laws would do jack and shit to stop them from voting, and Jack left town.
Voter ID is a solution in search of a problem - like I said the first time. The real purpose is to prevent "undesirables" from voting - just be honest about it.
But the US have landed on the shores of several other countries in the past century or so.
After the elections of 1933, the Fuehrer suspended all paper ballots, and electronic ones had not been invented or conceived of yet.
E-voting is such an interesting case of "the client doesn't know what he wants" - basically all people with a little more than passing IT competence know it is a bad idea, for many reasons. Sure - you could in theory add blockchains or whatever to it to make it a bit more sensible, but why bother? Never touch a working (paper voting) system!
But people that do not grok IT, out of ignorance or malice, really love the idea of e-voting, and are surprisingly hard to convince of their error.