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."

Comments

I'm not the ludite

[Swistak]

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.

Diebold and Harris

[PopeRatzo]

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...