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Brazil Reverting to Paper Ballots Amid Budget Crisis

posted by cmn32480 on Friday December 04 2015, @09:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-for-hanging-chads dept.

"gewg_" writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @11:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @11:10PM (#271991)

    On the 25th October 2002 The FREE e-democracy Project (who supported and organised GNU.FREE's development) formally stopped production and support of the GNU.FREE Internet voting system.

    Why stop?

    Here's what the project's founder and co-ordinator had to say:

    25-10-2002 FREE project policy change...

    From my experience of designing and developing GNU.FREE over the past three years it has become clear that creating an Internet Voting system sufficiently secure, reliable and anonymous is extremely difficult, if not impossible. As Bruce Schneier points out "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."

    I've spent much of my limited time and energy trying to persuade people (and the UK government in particular) that a Free Software voting system is the only realistic way a trustworthy voting system could be created. But they are culturally set in their ways and always need to deal with companies, no matter how fragile their security actually is. Governments don't even have the skills to assess the reliability of the people let alone the technologies these companies sell.

    - GNU.FREE [gnu.org]

    Incidentally, I think that Bitcoin network may hold the title as the first secure network application in the history of computers.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @07:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @07:58AM (#272122)

    I think the key difference here is the over the internet part.