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 pe1rxq on Friday December 04 2015, @10:13AM
To bad it is due to budget problems, but I am glad to see them return to a more sane voting system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @10:28AM
Yup. My suggested dept. was
from the verifiable-voting dept.
Mow, maybe cmn32480 can explain to us just what the hell hanging chads have to do with hand-marked, hand-counted ballots.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday December 04 2015, @10:20AM
Many years ago at the JavaOne conference I saw a presentation given by the leaders of the effort to put together that electoral system. I don't remember much about it anymore except that it was a cool use of Java (for the time). It's a pity it's all gone (for now).
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @07:10PM
a cool use of Java
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @11:10PM
- 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
I think the key difference here is the over the internet part.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Friday December 04 2015, @10:23AM
The court says the move will cause "irreversible and irreparable damage" and says the public interest is at threat.
How so? Because it's harder to rig elections with paper ballots than with the usual electronic voting systems?
There are theoretical electronic voting systems that are secure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s [youtube.com]
However for diverse voter population they are not as good as paper voting system at satisfying one requirement: Convincing enough of the losers that they lost.
When your party's representatives/observers at the polling stations monitoring the counting tell you that most of the paper votes are for someone else and not your candidate, it does get pretty convincing especially if the ballot boxes were not moved and were in clear sight of observers at all times. It would take magicians and their assistants at each polling station to rig the election ;).
Yes in some less monitored areas people could swap the boxes or do other mischief, but not to scale of electronic votes unless you rig it completely Dictator-style - in which case it doesn't matter what system you use anyway.
It's a waste of tax money to have an election with results that don't convince enough of the losers that they've lost, or convince even the independent observers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @02:04PM
The Brasilian system is a bit more than just a list of names and a tick box to 'make your mark'. It has to cope with issues that might be uncommon where you live. They are certainly much less of an issue where I live (UK);
-
To deal with at least the first three issues all candidates are given numbers. You will see publicity material saying "Vote John Smith 522". Numbers are assigned so that the leading digit corresponds to the relevant political party (presumably this only applies to the most popular parties - I don't know what they do with less popular ones - stick them all under a common digit?). Short numbers are for more senior positions (president, mayor etc). Less senior positions get increasingly long numbers - So all the candidates for local councillor end up being 5 digits at least (can't recall if I've seen 6 digits).
When the voter enters that number the system pops up the name and *photo* of the candidate. The voter then confirms this is indeed the candidate they wish to vote for. This helps with the literacy issue.
I can only imagine that the court is worried that a large number of lengthy ballot papers (probably without a photo, or just a poor black and white one) will disenfranchise large numbers of people.
Personally I was impressed with the way local people described the system to me and the seriousness with which all people take politics and try to be informed. I don't recall meeting anyone who claimed this electronic voting system was anything other than 'good'. But my sample is small and biased so who knows :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @03:35PM
When the voter enters that number the system pops up the name and *photo* of the candidate. The voter then confirms this is indeed the candidate they wish to vote for. This helps with the literacy issue.
But what ensures that the voter's vote will actually go to that candidate? Wishful thinking? You can verify the source code for all you want, but who can verify the actual stuff that's installed? Even if you verify it after the elections, you could rig things so that the election rigging code is replaced with the legit code once the required number of fake votes and results are produced. There's plenty of other tricky things you can do with hardware and software.
With a paper ballot, when you mark it and put it in the ballot box, nobody else touches it but the people counting the votes later. In my country the people doing the counting show the paper ballot to those present during the counting process. It does take longer to count and recount, but I'm willing to wait. Yes there will be errors during the counting process, but even electronic voting systems don't eliminate all the errors, and the naive types of electronic voting systems introduce more opportunities to rig elections in easier ways.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 04 2015, @08:23PM
I guess the real issue here is whether voting failure caused by illiteracy outweigh that caused by electronic fraud. That's an empirical question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @05:44AM
Perhaps you might get election results that are better for the country if votes are lost[1] due to illiteracy. After all you don't normally let dogs vote and I bet most dogs would sell their vote for a cookie ;). In my country we have people in the jungle who sell their votes for about ten dollars or so. So I wouldn't cry too much if the votes of these bunch stopped getting counted.
As for whether there is fraud in electronic elections perhaps one has to do independent random polls to see if the electronic votes are close. But how would the masses know which polls are independent and which are commissioned by the winning fraudsters to legitimize their wins?
[1] Rather than miss-assigned. You can reduce the impact of randomly miss-assigned votes by using some of the measures mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_vote [wikipedia.org]
e.g. randomizing the order the candidates appear on the sheets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2015, @12:35AM
Generally I think 'election results' favour the people who vote. So in present day UK the over 60s have been largely protected from the recent economic turmoil and resulting 'austerity' because they do as a group tend to have a high turnout. Conversely young people have suffered a lot because they don't tend to vote in large numbers.
I imagine restricting the vote to people with a certain minimum level of education would result in an administration that favours the rich.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:33PM
How do these people prove they voted for a particular candidate and when do they get their 10 bucks?
In my country most of these people can be trusted to keep their promises. If you tell them to vote differently they'll tell you they've taken the money so they'll vote accordingly as promised. You don't have to believe me but it's the truth. That's why the ruling party can do lots of crap and still stay in power.
Some of them get cheated - they are only promised the goodies, and after the election they don't get those goodies, even if they delivered their end of the bargain. Then they complain to the party that lost... True story.
So if their votes are lost or aren't counted I'm not going to be too sad.
I've nothing against people selling their votes, but 10 bucks is too cheap esp if they don't get anything else good from that (the ruling Gov has kept them poor and undereducated for years and it still keeps paying off).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 04 2015, @02:40PM
Agreed. No electronic voting system can be considered "secure", unless it is backed up by paper. Or, tally marks on sticks, or something physical. Most of us here are techy types, or at least part time geeks. How many of us are capable of spoofing some votes? Or just changing votes? The software system isn't THAT sophisticated. Physical access would make it so easy, remote access might be difficult, but I'm certain it can be done.
To me, the risk of being caught would certainly not be worth the effort. To a serious contender for public office, things look a lot different.
Paper ballots? Not so easy to get to physically, and impossible to get at remotely.
(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.
(Score: 1) by wirelessduck on Saturday December 05 2015, @06:43AM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @07:39PM
Incorrect. Rigging Diebold style is electronic not paper.
Dictator-style: http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/13/the-dictators-dilemma-to-win-with-95-percent-or-99/ [foreignpolicy.com]
(where it can be electronic or paper or whatever - doesn't matter - it's very results oriented and works whether voters are blind or not or in some cases even if they are dead ).
(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_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @04:02PM
I thought the Billions we pissed away at systems like these were meant to "save us Billions more! And not make our cronies even Filthier Richer, promise, scout's honor, cross my heart!." So why is the system more expensive in Brazil than their paper ballot system?
I really want to move to Mars, declare myself Emperor, and hold no elections just so I can stop having to deal with these theatrics around the robing and raping of the public.