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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: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday December 04 2015, @02:54PM
It's not just a matter of "can" be better. A couple of the rules that must be followed for a vote to have integrity include:
1. There must be a clear non-modifiable record of each vote.
2. The non-modifiable record of each vote must be what is actually counted.
Nearly all electronic voting systems fail on rule 1, because if you can modify the data to register a vote, you can unmodify it just as easily. If you try to solve that problem with a voter-verifiable paper record (this was talked about and used in a lot of electronic voting machines about a decade ago), the paper trail was frequently illegible (violating rule 1), but even if it was clear it was almost never counted (violating rule 2).
Also, I don't know about your neck of the woods, but in my home area part of the standard elections process was that certain precincts routinely had voting machine malfunctions immediately when the polls opened, insuring that those precincts had hours-long waits to vote while other precincts were a 10-minute process to vote. These precincts just happened to be the areas that were staunchly in opposition to the party that the top election official was a member of. I'm sure that this was all accidental, of course. When we switched to paper ballots, there was no machine to conveniently have break, so this no longer happens.
A few other rules that have to be enforced that existing electronic systems and proposed Internet voting systems violate:
3. Nobody but a voter may be able to cast a vote.
4. Nobody but the voter may be able to know for certain what that vote was (a lot of vote-by-mail options violate this one as well, which is why I'm wary of that).
5. All votes must be counted.
6. Nobody may vote more than once (sorry, Chicago residents!).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.