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Sky News reports
It was one of the world's early adopters of high-tech electronic voting. [Now, however, Brazil will] revert to using paper [ballots] because it cannot afford to run the electoral computer systems.
The Superior Electoral Court has had its funding cut by the equivalent of £75M--in the middle of a tender for computer systems for next year's elections.
The process was due to be finalised this month but has been thwarted by the government cuts and voters will now cast their ballots using paper instead.
The court says the move will cause "irreversible and irreparable damage" and says the public interest is at threat.
A statement read: "The biggest impact of the budget cuts is around the purchasing of electronic voting equipment, as bidding and essential contracting is already under way and to be concluded by end of December."
El Reg notes
Brazil has had electronic voting in some form since 1996, when it first trialled systems in the state of Santa Catarina. The system was subject to criticism in 2014, when ZDNet Brazil reported on university tests that suggested the system wasn't sufficiently secure against fraud.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday December 04 2015, @12:41PM
You can do home banking, negotiate bitcoins, but you cannot vote, in 2015.
I say that governments that really are expression of the people would have let people vote within a system of direct democracy by now.
Cue the "people are too stupid for that" -> of course they are, that's what the education/entertainment dichotomy does to people, a handy tool for the politicians and their backers to keep the status quo.
Cue the "people cannot possibly have the expertise on all the fields required to vote in direct democracy" -> neither do politicians, in fact politicians have one less field of expertise than everybody who has an actual job. Moreover nothing prevents people to follow party or media advice on issues, like they do now.
Until I see the current system transform in a direct democracy, AKA a democracy, where globalism and nationalism are restricted in their scope as much as possible, I'll keep being convinced that the one world government is intended to reduce the effective democratic power of the single citizen to zero, because the overhead of coordinating the entire population of the planet on issue is impossibly high.
/end rant
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @02:10PM
You can do home banking, negotiate bitcoins, but you cannot vote, in 2015.
Yes, much like how a child can ride a bicycle at age 10 but is not allowed to drive a car. Voting is a much harder problem than baking or bitcoins due to it having more complicated requirements. Specifically, the requirement that it be anonymous.
For banking (and bitcoins) it's easy. I hand you a slip of paper saying "AC agrees to pay Bot $100." Then in the future there is a record of the transaction, and if there is a disagreement the courts or whoever can go back to this piece of paper. How do you do this same transaction if you leave off the name AC? What happens in the future when Bot says "the agreement was for $150?" How do you ensure that AC doesn't promise the same $100 to multiple people? This analogy is becoming a bit stretched, but the point still stands. How do you ensure a consistent truthful audit-able system without allowing some nefarious administrator being able to either undermine the whole thing or find out how individual people voted? Moreover, how do you convince a naive and ignorant public that you have successfully done so?
Assuming you are in software development, an analogy I would draw is "it's hard to debug a problem with a comprehensive problem report, timestamps, and logs. Try detecting, let alone debugging, the same problem with access to none of that."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday December 04 2015, @02:24PM
Here's the problem with direct democracy: It means that decisions are being made either by those with the most spare time on their hands (who are probably not the people that have the best understanding of the issue in question) or those who don't take the time to really consider all aspects of the question.
Also, almost all of those proposed direct democracy systems are predicated on easy access to some sort of computing device with Internet access. Both of those cost money, and not everybody has them. Particularly in Brazil, where there is a significant population several days' journey from anything resembling civilization.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @08:30PM
The bank ties your identity to every point in the process.
At the polling place, the paper you drop into the box isn't traceable back to you.
With remote voting, how do you verify that a boss|patriarch|landlord|Mafia leg-breaker|etc. isn't manipulating the voter?
(I'm not thrilled about the mail-in ballot notion either and for the same reason.)
Convenience and security tend to be orthogonal.
-- gewg_