1.9 Billion Digits: Brazil's Bid For Biometric Voting

MatthewVD writes "Brazil is on a massive fingerprinting spree, with the goal of collecting biometric information from each of its 190 million citizens and identifying all voters by their biological signatures by 2018. The country already has a fully electronic voting system and now officials are trying to end fraud, which was rampant after the military dictatorship ended. Dissenters complain that recounts could be impossible and this opens the door for new kinds of fraud. Imagine this happening in the U.S."

digits == fingers, not numerals

[ClickOnThis]

The article refers to digits as in those things at the ends of our hands, not numeric digits. So, the actual amount of data will be far bigger than 1.9 billion numeric digits. Nothing they can't handle, of course.

Re:GODDAMNIT

[marcosdumay]

It is because of that anonimity requirement.

Anonimity makes it impossible to make a secure (in the mathematical sense) election. The best we can do is to make the flaws hard to exploit, what is a completely diferent problem from securing an ATM.

Re:TF2

[Anonymous Coward]

In Brazil the fingerprint is already available to law enforcement. The Brazilian identity card already has it printed on the back
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_identity_card

Re:Sounds like

[alexgieg]

Several times? What are they?

When you make your National ID card you must give them (all ten fingers), as well as anytime you renew it, for any reason, be it because it was stolen, because you lost them, or because it's time to renew it, which is once every 10 years (although you usually only discover it's time to renew it when you try to open a bank account and someone tells you your ID is void). The same goes for your passport, which is valid for 5 years, although most people don't have one, so this one is optional.

Don't people refuse to give them, or or use fake fingerprint skins to defeat the system?

Nope. Brazil has no recent history of extensive persecution of minorities, so the huge majority of the population doesn't mind.

Brazil has always seemed to me like the next fascist superpower, going beyond China.

Ah, I don't think so. People here mostly don't care about anything political, at all. And the governing parties, all of them, are corrupt in a purely non-ideological way, interested solely in money above anything and everything else. This isn't the kind of scenario that leads to fascism. Besides, when we had a fascist party, way back, it was as odd in its "fascistness" as anything that happens around here. I remember reading once a text by its founder, I don't remember his name, criticizing then Nazi Germany and fascist Italy for persecuting Jews and foreigners. Go figure...

Re:A voting machine is better than paper

[bussdriver]

Well, I've been involved in a recount and I have a lot of computer experience plus some experience in security and forensics and I say PAPER is the only way forward. Yes, hand counts are dull and take a lot of labor; it is a small price to pay (especially compared to those who die defending democracy.)

Your post is almost entirely distracting side issues without addressing the core problem.

As Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes." You think merely by having the people who count the votes 1 step removed from directly counting the votes makes things safer? WRONG.

It is not a machine counting the votes anymore than a gun kills a victim-- it is the person behind the machine that does it. Do not be so literal minded. The machine, like a firing squad, hides which person actually did it, they themselves may not even know.

You put that accounting computer out on the internet and tell everybody it can not make mistakes and publish the IP address. Lets see how well it works in the real world (not to mention how much better secured your PC likely is over most voting machines I've seen or read about.)

Re:Imagine?!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Brazil, every single party or entity (like universities, etc) has access to the full source code for the elecion systems, terminals and servers. The code is digitally signed by all those parties and any of them can ask for an independent audit. Random voting machines with printers are also spread out the country. Is there a room for fraud? Of course, no system is 100% secure but so far, no fraud was detected. With so many eyes looking at the whole process, nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud.

Re:GODDAMNIT

[Leafheart]

We try to do what we can here to help with that. As the summary mentions, we had tons of problems during and after the military dictatorship in Brazil (payed by the US of course) in the 60s to 80s. On the early days of democracy, voting fraud was rampant, since it was the same basic politics of yore, now with a thin veil of democratic participation. Voting, before the fully e-vote system was rampant with fraud, and delays, Florida level of delays.

We tried our best to make the e-vote machines and the election system as secure and transparent as possible, among what was done we have.

• Voting registration is mandatory when you turn eighteen. When you do you receive a card and is assigned a voting station which is close to your home (if you move you can change). This allows every party to know, much ahead of time, how many votes are expected at each pooling station. To avoid extra votes.
• There is no touch screen to deal with it. The voting is done on a numeric keyboard. You know prior hand, during the campaign the number for each candidate. So no fiddling with positioning to mark it for the other candidate.
• The source code is open any political party has access to it. They recently ran a public audit\hacking of the system to search for flaws. They found one, which is getting fixed for the next election. And the bug was regarding anonymity( it was possible to de-scramble the vote order so i you have the order people voted you could know who voted for who. But you would have to breach in two fronts).
• Before the election in a public ceremony the code is uploaded, checksumed, and the machines locked. So we know which code is in there.

So yeah, not perfect, but it is so much better and safe than what we had on the paper ballot days, that noone wants to go back.

Re:Imagine?!

[fgouget]

In Brazil, every single party or entity (like universities, etc) has access to the full source code for the elecion systems, terminals and servers. The code is digitally signed by all those parties and any of them can ask for an independent audit.

All they have access to is the code that purportedly is being run on the voting computers. But on election day they have no way to verify that the code that runs is the one they looked at and signed.

With so many eyes looking at the whole process,

What you see as 'so many eyes' I see as so few eyes. In a paper election anyone can verify the process and a significant fraction of the population actually does. In electronic voting very few people can verify anything. And in particular none of the parties or universities you mentionned above can do anything to verify that the election is fair.

nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud.

Most people don't claim there has been fraud. However what most researchers in the field and most computer scientists do say is that there is no way to know, that if fraud happens there won't be any proof anyway, and that electronic voting makes the voting process opaque.