1.9 Billion Digits: Brazil's Bid For Biometric Voting 140
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."
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Insightful)
If the Brazilian Government was just a bit organized, it would already have the fingerprint of everybody. It already collects them, and several times. It is just one more collection.
By the way, I just don't get the antagony some people have about the government cadastrating people. No, it doen't lead to retriction of freedom, and is not necessary for that.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for the government to gather fingerprints of all its citizens "for their own good". After all, election fraud is bad...almost "It's for the children!" bad.
Of course, a smarter government would find a way to require DNA samples, rather than simple fingerprints, "to prevent election fraud".
It is an escalation, but Brazil already had fingerprints on all citizens. I remember my ID card, the one the article mentioned their replacing with the new biometric stuff, had my thumbprint. (Contents of the card [wikipedia.org])
Now I'm older, and I grew up in the US and actually care about this kind of stuff as a result of the culture shift. That said, I can tell you that Brazilians tend to not give much thought to the government having that information. At least my mother and her family don't, and I'm under the impression they're representative of the general population in that regard.
Re:Dead people voting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Until they decompose, dead people still have finger prints. Don't worry about Chicago, they are probably well stocked with cryogenic freezing facilities for the storage of digits, as needed.
And of course, let's not forget that I think the Mythbusters proved it's pretty easy to fake out fingerprint scanners with some putty and a little bit of spit.
A voting machine is better than paper (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a poll worker, and my precinct uses electronic voting machines. The thing most people don't realize is that very, very few elections are close enough to trigger an automatic recount. In my state, the votes have to be within 1% of each other for a recount. Since the 1800s, for example, only 3 senatorial races in my state were close enough.
If you want to optimize the accuracy of an election, you need to focus on the vast majority of races that aren't recounts. To spend all your time and effort building the perfect system for recounting is, as they say, to make the perfect the enemy of the good. People on slashdot, especially, trumpet the advantages of a paper ballot, because it can be recounted.
Let me tell you the problems with paper. Paper is not a nice medium to use to count anything. It gets torn, smudged, creased, turned around upside down and backwards, lost, and sticks to other paper. Marking is difficult, even if done with a physical machine (hanging chads) or with a scanner (in the Illinois primary, the ballots wouldn't fit into the feeder unless they were trimmed 1/16th of an inch.) Don't even talk about markings done by hand.
If you want to count something accurately, you use a computer to do it with. No one expects that if you have a spreadsheet sum 3,000 integers 10,000 times in row that you will wind up with a different answer. Do that with paper and people, and you WILL have a different answer -- lots of them.
Computers are also easier to use than paper. They have an interactive interface. They can ask the voter to confirm their vote. They can change the size of the typeface on the fly.
So, if you want the most accurate vote with the best experience, you want a computer, every time. Now, on to the hard problem: how do you tell if the computer is cheating? Well, you don't need paper to tell if a computer is broken; you just need a reliable QA test. Black-box testing is the heart of modern software quality control. We don't insist that our accounting programs print us a receipt for everything. Why do we trust accounting software, but not voting software?
What's needed is to bring the same quality assurance controls to electronic voting machines that we do to accounting programs. Let people have their interactive GUIs, let the poor poll workers have a system that is proven to count accurately every time. This is what would optimize voting for the vast majority of races.
Re:Imagine?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Brother Jeb Bush, and friends ring a bell?
The debacle of the 2000 Florida election was because of paper ballots. If it was illegitimate (I am taking no position on this regard), then it proves that you don't need an electronic system to steal the election if there is systematic corruption already in place. Having an electronic election doesn't help or hurt election fraud in this case, however it does remove a few hundred (thousand?) people involved in counting/reading ballots, each of whom could be corrupt.
Re:Imagine?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an electronic election doesn't help or hurt election fraud in this case, however it does remove a few hundred (thousand?) people involved in counting/reading ballots, each of whom could be corrupt.
It removes many who individually could have only a marginal impact on the results while at the same time increasing the size of the "lottery" - such that it is now:
a) Possible for a single invidiual with the right access to corrupt the entire election
b) Do it with much less chance of getting caught because purging an electronic audit trail is a million times easier than covering up physical ballot stuffing at thousands of polling stations
Re:Imagine?! (Score:5, Insightful)
What it does, whether actual fraud takes place or not, is to open the door to allegation of fraud that cannot be refuted.
I don't know about your country, in mine, every party that participated in the election has the right to call for a recount (at their expense) and send representatives to supervise that recount. Supervising such a recount is trivial. The skills needed by a superviser include being able to identify where a cross has been made on a slip of paper and being able to count paper slips. The average 6 year old should be able to do that with some certainty.
That's not the case with e-voting. It all starts with being unable to tell whether every vote was counted correctly in the first place. Was every vote placed where the voter made his "cross"? With pen-and-paper elections, you have a physical slip of paper that is tossed into the voting bin by the person who votes. The voter goes into the booth, he makes his cross, he comes back out and he dumps a piece of paper himself into the box, under the eyes of representatives of every participating party. The box has been throughly inspected by them all to make sure it's empty before it was sealed, again with them identifying the seal, and they again are there when that seal is broken and the counting starts. There is simply NO way you could possible remove or add any votes illegally.
Not so with electronic booths. Was the "box" empty? And even if, does the box only count every vote once? It's trivial to multiply datasets, how can I know for sure that the code doesn't do that? I can audit it? Let's assume I cannot, like more than 99% of the people out there. Why should I trust you, auditor? Maybe you're in with them and get a ton of money to shut up about their fraud? And how should I recount? I don't even know if the votes you present to me were real because there is no paper slip being tossed into the box, let alone by the voter himself. Did you make dead people vote? Or how do you explain the suspiciously high voter turnout this time?
The problem isn't fraud alone. It's that you cannot simply debunk allegations of fraud easily. Today, you cry foul? Here's the ballots, you can see where the cross was made, you can count, go ahead and check. Your party member has been there all the time and he saw that our box was legit. It's trivial to check either for any person without handicaps. I'd wager about 99% of the voters could easily recount today and be part of the process that ensures that no fraud can happen.
With electronic voting, more than 99% cannot.
And now convince those 99+% that you have been elected legally when the losing parties cry foul and you cannot prove them wrong without reasonable doubt.