Electronic Ballots In The Brazilian Presidential Election 298
jorlando writes "On Sunday (06-Oct) Brazil will again use electronic ballots for its Presidential Elections. Since a lot of /. readers from time to time talk about the pros and cons of this type of technology, it's a chance to see how it perform well (at least in Brazil...). Representatives from NGOs, ONU and foreign Governments were invited as observers and to see a working electronic votation system in a huge scale, since there are more than 115 million of voters in Brazil ... usually the results of the election are given 4 hours after the closing of the ballots (17:00 Brasilia -3GMT), with a small margin of error, since only 98% of the votes are computed in 4 hours ... some ballots are in places (mostly in far-away rural areas and in the Amazon region) that need to be taken to larger cities to be connected to the vote-download system ... ballots are made by Procomp, the comunication sytem is a VPN-like made by Embratel. The election can be accompanied by the main Brazilian notice sites (http://www.uol.com.br , http://www.estado.com.br, http://www.globo.com and others), mostly only Portuguese, so use the fish!"
won't be happy (Score:4, Interesting)
With manual voting people oversee people. Not perfect but at least if there is wide spread corruption the knowledge of that corruption at least leaks out somewhere.
With the electronic voting, it is in its infancy and there is easily the ability to implement a corrupt system with far less chance of being caught.
Its not that computers are less accurate or less reliable that people- quite the opposite- its just that having fewer people involved means less scrutiny and a greater chance of being able to be undetectably corrupt.
Even if you can check the source code used (which should be essential otherwise you know nothing at all about the systems integrity) you can't be guarenteed that that same source is the stuff used on the day.
Basically i wont be surprised when we find out that a government somewhere was in power for a decade or more winning every election only to find that the elections were a scam.
Ok there are plenty of scam elections now but we can see for ourselves that they are rigged.
Re:Interesting thing...... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting thing...... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting thing...... (Score:3, Interesting)
And the voting is like in France: if someone doesn't win with a certain majority, the two best go to a second round.
Electoral College (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's anythng like Bolivia..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting thing...... (Score:3, Interesting)
It does achieve the goal of high turnouts though - something like 98% of those eligible vote (or at least turn up, get their names crossed off, and vote CowboyNeal).
Yeah, Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would like *all* ballots to print votes, and some ballots be selected by chance *after* the election to compare physical and electronic results.
I work in the elections (3rd election this year), as a "mesario" (the person who guides people to vote, for those unfamiliar with the system), and I can assure you that "people is the most vulnerable part of the system" is very easy to say, but the problem that the system is difficult to use to old people is not a people's problem, but a system's problem. Was there *any* usability study on the design of the electronic ballot?
I could go on and on, but I worked the full day for free for the elections, having to deal with 80 year olds that are not required to vote but still do anyway, to participate in the democracy (which I think is nice), but can't figure out how to use the electronic ballot (first usability assumption made incorrectly by the TSE: people do read what is on screen. They don't!), and then I come home to read slashdot, to read that the system is nice? Nice piece of sh*t.
The really nice thing about the brazilian elections is the logistics, of distributing ballots everywhere (midle of the jungle, midle os the swamp, northeast, everywhere), and then bringing all floppy discs (yeah, 1.4MB floppies! What happens if it gets CRC errors?!) back to the counting places.
It is not the technology. It's all the process (Score:2, Interesting)
1. The system is easy to use and taught on national television campaigns. Just punch your candidate number, see his/her picture and confirm (6 times today - president, governor, senator twice, federal and state assembly representatives, granted).
2. The voting machines are not perfect, but there are lots of security safeguards, auditing (there should be more). The source code core is reused and belongs to the supreme electoral tribunal. Operating system and compiler are closed, though. OS was VirtuOs, compiler was Borland C 4.5.
3. There is cryptography, binary hash codes, ways to audit on the spot, battery back-up, extra voting machines ready for substitution (around 4,000 or 1% of them failed), and even paper ballots as contingency (around 100 paper ballot boxes were used in 320,000 voting stations). Vote tallies are saved on three different places on every machine.
4. 320,000 voting machines plus back-ups had software put on them, were sealed and sent around the country were people were trained to deal with them (one friend of mine was drafted to be a technician. His job: boot the machine, follow procedure to check it is ok. If not, ask for a replacement, repeat. If none works, inform judge, who will order paper voting). Many others were trained to do simple well defined jobs, with contingency previously planed.
5. Before, when paper ballors were used, there were many other rules to be followed and it was much easier to rig votes. Counting was done on open places, under the eyes of lots of people, but frauds still happened. First, there was the problem of the transport of ballot boxes to places were votes were counted. Sometimes some disapeared for some time. Then, there was the problem of blank votes (undervotes). Someone could surrepticiously place a mark on those votes when they were being taken from a ballot box and counted, and valid votes could be invalidated vy placing a second mark (overvote). So, there were rules against pens (the only allowed colors for voters were blue and green (if I remember right). Vote counting workers could only carry red pens. To carry a pen of another color were considered a crime, and there were stamps with which ballots were marked first time, when they were taken from the ballot box, so that undervotes and overvotes wouldn't be used. Votes were counted out loud, with totals being declared loudly for party inspectors to verify.
Totals were put on large tables and read, loudly, then sent by telephone to the tribunal. Parties would set up parallel totalization schemes to make sure those numbers were right. There were also some people who would try to rig ballot boxes by placing extra votes on ballot boxes when voting stations were still open. The old system was hardly safer than the current one, and the Tribunal went to great lengths to make fraud difficult.
6. The electronic voting was not instituted to speed up the results. It did so, but mostly, it was a way to simplify processes and reduce the possibility of fraud. And the process is still not simple. The tribunal is well funded and well organized. They tested the systems carefully for many years before comissioning it. This is a mature 10-year old system, and they still improve it all the time.
7. Fact is, they understand the choices they made, and they seem to be avid risks [ncl.ac.uk] readers.
8. In a nutshell, it is not the voting machines that make the elections in Brazil better than those in the U.S., but the fact that elections are considered really important, and great care is take n to make sure stupid mistakes won't happen. Elections are not improvised, they are really well thought out, and TSE do what it takes to make them work (they have a reputation to keep) be it related to hardware purchase, software development, auditing and testing, auditing procedures, planing, regulation, training and education.