SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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).