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

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 Saturday December 05 2015, @05:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @05:44AM (#272094)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2015, @12:35AM (#272309)

    Perhaps you might get election results that are better for the country if votes are lost[1] due to illiteracy.

    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.

    In my country we have people in the jungle who sell their votes for about ten dollars or so.

    • Selling your vote would seem to be orthogonal to literacy. Perhaps correlated with poverty, which in turn is surely related to education.
    • One goal of a good voting system, be it paper or PC, is to prevent anyone knowing how another person voted (precisely to stop people being intimidated or bribed to vote for someone). How do these people prove they voted for a particular candidate and when do they get their 10 bucks?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:33PM (#273412)

      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).