Slashdot Log In
E-Voting Raises New Questions In Brazil
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Oct 02, 2006 05:05 AM
from the how-to-handle-diebold dept.
from the how-to-handle-diebold dept.
Zaatxe writes, "Today is election day in Brazil. About 125 million people are expected to vote for president, governor, congressman (for both state and federal levels) and senator. The Washington Post has some interesting details about the electronic voting machines used in Brazil. From the article: 'Elections in Brazil used to be a monumental challenge, with millions of paper ballots to count by hand, many of them delivered by canoe and horseback from remote Amazon villages. Fraud was widespread, and it often took a week or more to determine the winners. Latin America's largest country eliminated many of these hassles by switching to electronic voting a decade ago, long before the United States and other countries... Some computer programmers who have closely examined Brazil's system say... confidence is misguided... Some Brazilians are lobbying... to switch from Windows CE to an open-source operating system for the voting machines, since Microsoft Corp., citing trade secrecy, won't allow independent audits to make sure malicious programmers haven't inserted commands to "flip" votes from one candidate to another.'" Read more below.
As a Brazilian voter, it was a shock for me to see that the voting machines here are made by Diebold. But what makes me confident in the system can also be found in the article: "Given the choice of picking a system where wholesale rigging is easy, versus one where it's impossible, why has Brazil gone with the system where it's easy? Brazil did build in some safeguards during its transition to electronic voting — protections that still don't exist in the US. While the code behind Microsoft's operating system remains secret, independent auditors must approve of the overlying voting software before it is inserted into the nation's 430,000 machines. The software remains open to inspections for three months before election day. And hours before the polls open, randomly chosen voting machines are tested 'to verify that the software inside does what it is supposed to do.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Simplicity is important ... (Score:5, Insightful)
India has been using an EVM [wikipedia.org] for a while, it has no operating system and is a bare-bones equivalent of a calculator with a line printer attached. Hook it up to a standard dot-matrix printer and get voting. It is probably as simple as a system can be.
No government which outsources its technology to vote can remain soverign. Machiavelli didn't go on and on about mercenaries, for nothing. And all said & done, this doesn't actually mean an honest election brings up a good government - we're intelligent induviduals, who form dumb mobs, pulled & manipulated by politicians with electoral issues (which are non-issues in the real sense).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had enough with the "I'm being manipulaaaaaated!!11" excuse. Grow a fucking spine and admit that you do what *you* want to do.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I voted today and... (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it's somewhat weird that one can't directly vote as "null" (this means, in other words, you're refraining yourself from participating). In order to vote as "null", you have to pick an invalid candidate number. It's been like this since the last election (or maybe before, but I can't recall). There's apparently not much press on the fact. So I guess most uninformed people (majority, as usual) would simply do otherwise just thinking "they've done something wrong". For some reason, it seems to be this is a form of pushing the nation into voting *for someone*. Call me paranoid, but I can't see a good reason for that. It reminds me of that quote: "if voting worked, it would be illegal".
And yes, I'd rather not participate. There may not be any evidence of fraud in our elections, but I don't see the point in participating in the circus of lies that is politics in Brazil. If after all these years no one has realized politicians (right/left wing, doesn't matter) aren't out to help anyone there, they well deserve what's happening now.
The soul of South America lies within Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina.Re:I voted today and... (Score:5, Informative)
1) A nullified vote means you made a mistake picking a candidate. This "mistake" can be delibered or not.
2) If you are not willing to participate (considering that voting is mandatory in Brazil), the voting machine has a "blank" button.
3) The voting machines have the "blank" button since the first prototype in 1996. Actually, the design of the voting machine hasn't changed much since then.
4) The blank vote has always existed, since the paper ballot and it has the same effect of nullified votes. But the blank votes were the fraud source in paper ballots: some dishonest vote counters would fill the blank votes during counting. Believe me, that happened much often than you can imagine. With voting machines, that's impossible.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
A blank vote means "I don't care". A null vote mean "I'm not satisfied with any of the candidates".
Blank votes goes for the candidates with the most votes in the last turn. On the other hand, if in the last turn no candidate reaches 50%+1 votes (because of the null votes), the election is cancelled, and the current candidades may not run for the next one.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My dear heavens! Where did you take this idea from? The election could be cancelled if, and only if, more than 50% of total votes were null. "Could be cancelled", it's not for sure. It's up to the Supreme Electoral Court to decide what happens if more
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Why Does Diebold Oppose Printers? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only explanation I can think of is that they are afraid their buggy voting machines will give different counts than the paper ballots. Despite all the worries and fuck ups with Diebold machines people won't really believe that the machines are problematic until they can see they screwed up in a real life situation. Sure there were a couple incidents where a machine started counting backward or people fucked up but this doesn't necessarily seem any more serious than the flaws in paper voting and after all these problems were caught.
Yes if problems are caught there are probably others that aren't but it doesn't have the same PR effect.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything to make it more likely that every vote is accurately tallied sounds like a worthwhile use of taxpayer dollars.
Electronic voting machines that can't be audited--why again?
Re:Why Does Diebold Oppose Printers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any approximation is useless without knowing the limits to which it applies. What needs to happen is a study needs to be done to find the percent error in the voting process (paper or electronic), and if the final votes are within this percent something needs to happen.
If Bush wins an election by 1.0% of the population, while the margin of error on the voting process is +/-3.0%, well then did he really win the election?? Any counting process is useless without knowing error margins, voting included. What if the margin of error is +/- 10%?? This needs to be figured out.
Parent
MS Ain't So Bad Here (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure people are going to claim the 'lots of eyeballs' effect makes linux more secure. However, there are major sections of the code that are deep vodoo and very very few people understand. An attacker would of course choose to put his code in one of these sections and if you are really running this code atop a full blown OS and you know (because the government has demanded it be published) the software that will run on top of if there are probably tons and tons of innocent looking ways to screw with the results.
I don't know if this would really work but one might imagine a situation where the ballot will be divided into two pages. Likely whether or not the vote was recorded and sent to permanent memory before the page is flipped or after will have some statistical difference in memory reservations or paging or some subsystem like this. One could code a race condition that scrambles the cast vote which while rare is slightly more statistically likely to happen in these situations than the other ones. Hell in an election often the young have different voting patterns than the old so you could just have some statistical relation to the speed at which options are picked.
The point is the bad guy is likely to have lots of resources and be able to concentrate them in one very small area of the code in a way that looks valid or if discovered innocent. The eye balls need to look over all the code. Yet we know from the number of bugs found in the linux kernel that many bugs do make it past without even being engineered to like innocous.
While the MS kernel is likely to be more buggy it is much harder to contribute a patch to the MS kernel making it more difficult for a bad guy to slip the code into the kernel in the first place. So while it would be nice if the kernel was visible to everyone I think not accepting third party patches is a more important security feature than being open source for a situation like this. Getting someone hired as part of MS's OS team or corrupting one of them is way harder than getting a patch acceted to the linux kernel that delibrately contains a very subtle area.
Of course what they really should be doing is not using anything complicated like a real OS anyway and instead an EVM.
Re:MS Ain't So Bad Here (Score:4, Interesting)
In an election situation there are just TONS of correlations between voting patterns and the state of the voting machine (how quickly people select options, how busy the machine is, how warm the machine is etc.. etc..). The bad guys just need to pick one correlation to use in their attack. The eyeballs need to look for every exploitable correlation making their job very very hard.
This asymetry means that it is more efficent to raise the barrier to inserting the bug in the first place by using code that doesn't accept third party patches than to try to find the bugs once they are in there.
Of course the right kind of OSS kernel would be even better, e.g., minix (I don't think tannenbaum accepts 3rd party patches) or some other closed development community but between linux and windows here windows wins for all the reasons that make it worse other places.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably simplistic but MS=USA=bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine if there was a borderline vote in some US states and the voting machines were running a closed software package from a country that had potential influence and something to lose or gain over who got elected.
I can imagine concerns might be raised in the voting areas by some people.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yours truly,
GWB
------
That wasn't very hard or costly.
Re:MS Ain't So Bad Here (Score:4, Insightful)
You are saying that in order to hack the linux kernel, you would need to make a patch to the mainstream kernel, and get it accepted. Someone will review your code, and you need to disguise it as a fix for something. For this step alone, that involves deceiving kernel hackers, you need the knowledge of a top level kernel hacker, and there are few of them, and _some_ of them can't be easily bought for any reasonable amount of money, because they are well known people, and have a reputation to protect.
Then you need to make sure that the makers of the machines use a recent enough version of Linux. So you need to send the patch at least one year, and more realistically, a couple of years in advance.
After that, you need to pray that, in the meantime, your code doesn't break anything for any of its millions of users. And some of those millions are actually watching the changelog, and could find some flaw in your patch by chance.
With any closed kernel, there is not known worldwide development process, so it _could_ be much easier to instill a bad patch, you maybe just need to buy one developer for a ridiculous amount of money, and that would be it. Of course, they could have better safeguards, but we don't know anything about that, so we can safely assume the worst.
Aside from that, I think these ways of skeweing the elections are overkill. You can always buy your votes on-site, and find a way to change the software of the voting machines on delivery, or maybe changing the whole voting machine before it goes to its place. You can buy some auditors, or people at Diebold. That would be much easier, safer and cheaper than changing the OS kernel.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Never mind that, you'd also need to pray that you correctly guessed the candidates and the way people will actually enter their vote all those years before the election...
Mod parent up... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even less people understand the voodoo of the MS kernel and there is no way to examine the kernel later. Say 10 people do understand the kernel voodo and are interested and able to analyze it, that would be enough to detect if somebody changed the kernel or not or did something else with it.
With MS if 10 people can underst
diebold only _MAKES_ them but don't have the IP (Score:5, Interesting)
when the system was first develop and used in capitol cities in the 90's, procomp (one of the manufacturers hired to develop the system) was not a diebold subsidiary yet. the other two were Itautec (subsidiary of the 2nd largest private bank of brasil) and Unisys.
all the intelectual property developed by the 3 companies was transfered to the union.
since the IP belongs to the government, they can choose to hire other comapnies to manufacture the units in the future if they son choose.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How hard can voting machine software be? (Score:2)
When a button is pressed run a lookup on the table and increment to count for that candidate.
Send some text to a line printer with details of the vote.
Repeat untill end of election.
Have a button inside that dumps the vote count out to the line printer.
That's going to be a few hundred lines of code at worst, surley it doesn't take that long to pick up any bugs.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Actually it's only one line - but it's a line of Perl.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Forgive me, but that sounds like a VB programmer idea. Anyway, Sao Paulo state had about 1000 candidates for congressman. Are you sure putting them in the screen in with no preditable order would help anyway? It would only happen to make large lines in the voting precintes!
In Brazil every party has a 2-digit number that identifies it. For executive candidates (president, governor and mayor) they use the
Re: (Score:2)
Fraud is the lesser of Brazil's problems... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet, the leading candidate is the current president, whose government was swamped by all sorts of scandals -- the most recent being that members of his campaign's staff were arrested while trying to buy a (probably forged) dossier against the main opposing party's candidates.
In any decent country, such a man would not have reached the end of his term. Compared to Lula, Nixon was a saint! But here, reached the point where tons of people seem to believe honesty is not relevant to a politician. Or maybe they don't bother looking for it because they believe it's impossible to find...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
His main proposal is to reduce taxes, which may be the best thing a politician can do (and Brazil DESPERATELY needs); he intends to stimulate trading with rich countries, rather than third-world ones like Lula did; as governor of São Paulo, he reduced the state's payroll; and above all, as far as I know, he is a honest man.
About Heloísa Helena, let me tell you something. One of PSOL's founding members is a runaway italian convict named Achille Lollo. In 1973, h
Re: (Score:2)
I thank you for highl
Re: (Score:2)
It was better before (Score:2)
It's possible yes, to compromise a voting machine, but doing the same for a dozen of them
Good and secure machines (Score:3, Informative)
It's worse! (Score:3, Interesting)
A sound idea, don't you think? But, guess what? Yeah, the law wasn't approved. And as a result, there's absolutely no written proof at all of what or whom people actually voted for.
Also, there's a law around that forbids independent research of voting intentions to be spread in news some days before an election. I'm not sure whether this law is being enforced right now, but the official reason behind it is that such researchs "interfere" in the voting decision of the people. Now, just imagine what this means: e-voting machines registering "votes" that cannot be traced, plus voting researches disallowed days before an election. Yes, you're right: if someone that was far behind in the voting intentions got elected, it might be alleged that the people changed their mind between the last allowed research and actual election day. How can you argue against it? You can't.
This is the recipe on how you can build a dictatorship that has no appearance of being a dictatorship. You don't need to be violent. All you need is to put some clever technology into it, and you're done. Government becomes a permanent ownership of you and of your associates. After all, who said that multiple "competing" parties aren't really a single entity with lots of names, existing only for the people to believe they have choice?
In the last two presidential elections (2002 and this 2006 one), all the four presidential candidates were from left-wing parties. There's a range: from soft left-wing to extreme left-wing. But it's all left. Different parties, or single-party with four different names for you to "choose" from?
Who knows?
Re: (Score:2)
I remember that... too bad you just decided not to say why it wasn't approved. They tested this system in places where most voters are simple-minded people (for the Brazilian readers, it was in Sergipe and Distrito Federal) and they did it on purpose. It didn't work because it confused people. Instead of confirming the vote, most of them (for reasons I don't remember now) cancelled it, making the paper to be sheredded and the p
Re: (Score:2)
And no, as "a Brazilian" I shouldn't "know" any of it. As "a Brazilian" what I have is a duty to speak loudly on what's wrong. Paper balots are the best thing for democracy
Re: (Score:2)
And regarding parties, PFL is center, yes. A center party, having no position on anything, always aling himself with whoever can give it power. That's the case also with Maluf's PP, which is aligned with Lula's PT.
PRONA is a joke. But it's hardly a right-wing party either. The ideology of PRONA is based on the ideas o
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Trust (Score:2)
Also, why do the ballots move to the counters where counters could go themselves to the preccinct ?
Stop thinking that democracy is a complex thing to organize. When one can have an army, one can have a voting system that is rel
Re: (Score:2)
"Thy should a 3rd party tell me how I should use the xerox machine I own, the paper I own, the powder I own, and the book I own, in the way I choose to? Why should a 3rd party forbid me to resell whatever I made with property I possessed? After all, who own these things? Me, or th
Re:Microsoft has a reason to be worried (Score:5, Informative)
You are american, right? You must be, because you show little knowledge of foreign politics. Sure, Latin America has its share of "left-wing nutjobs", like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But that's not the case in Brazil. We also have our left-wing nutjobs (and one of them ended in third place in yesterday's election) but they seldom achieve anything important.
About the "little respect for forign IP in the past", it didn't matter if it was foreign or national, it was a question of public health, which should be one of the top priorities in any government. AIDS strikes harder on poor people, and the pharmaceutical industry doesn't seem to be willing to spread the return of their investiment for too long.
And just for you to know, the Minister of Health that made this move was a center-right wing politician (which by the way won the election for governor in Sao Paulo, where 1/4 or Brazil population lives).
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It has been some 20
Re: (Score:2)
Your argument is weak. No left party in history avoided making alliances with what they consider to be the right. The Brazilian left-wing parties are no exception. And in regards to social-democracy, don't forget th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I worked in the elections ( I was drafted..) and can tell you how it works. The person who comes to vote brings his 'Voting card' (lacking a better translation for Titulo Eleitoral), presents it to a person of the voting staff (like me) who checks in a list if he is scheduled to vote in that area. After, an
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. If you question the legitimacy of electronic voting without a paper trail, you are a terrorist.
I say we report CowboyNeal to DHS for harboring this kind of terrorism.
Re: (Score:2)
I can see how failures in voting processes could make democracy not look as grand as Americans say it is, but I don't see how not voting at all could be more favorable than voting with flaws.
Re: (Score:2)