As a software engineer and a huge fan of technology in general, I think electronic voting machines are the devil. Digital information is too easy to alter. Good old-fashioned paper elections are a well vetted technology that we know how to use and can be implemented and audited well. Electronic voting, not so much. It's not just important to have a free election, it's important that everyone has faith that it was a free election. Because if people no longer believe in the process, democracy will die. So it has to be transparent, audited by neutral and external parties, and it has to not just be impossible to tamper with, it also has to make everyone believe that it is impossible.
I hope the will of the people prevails over the supreme court in Brazil eventually.
All US CPUs are backdoored by Silicon Valley. Any data or computation can be changed, deleted or stolen. It uses radio, works even without Net access, including for BR voting machines.
There will be no computing freedom until the silicon trojans embedded in all US designed CPUs are removed.
If you want freedom, you will have to ensure that no unseen radiation is enabling remote control of your devices.
Ask me anything about BadBIOS and hardware trojans.
Yeah. I see these laymen on social media asking for source code without even understanding what source code even is. This is supposed to be a trustworthy, transparent system?
I agree with Germany's take on the matter: voting machines should be unconstitutional because citizens don't fully understand how it works. It's that simple. That's how a civilized country is supposed to work. Instead we have this circus where these judge-kings claim the machines are "unquestionable" and censor and fine and punish and ban from politics anyone who dares question anything.
In my country, New Zealand, we have fast reliable vote counting and it is all paper based and counted by hand. I don't understand how electronic systems make voting less complicated or cheaper.
We also have advanced (early) voting. You can vote one or two weeks early, election day is stress free.
Early votes counting starts at 9am in election day. So by the time that polls close most prelimary counting is already done.
The official count does take a couple of weeks, but around 10pm enough of the preliminary count is done that most electrotes have a winner.
Brazil is area is 32x bigger than NZ, 42x bigger population. We have election results 5h after election ends and there is no evidence whatsoever of fraud.
> Brazil is area is 32x bigger than NZ, 42x bigger population.
How is that relevant? Australia is 29x the area of New Zealand and 5x the population; and like New Zealand, it uses paper-based instead of electronic voting. I see no reason why a paper-based process can’t be scaled to work for a country of any size, even one bigger than Brazil.
> We have election results 5h after election ends
A slower but more trustworthy process is superior to a faster but less trustworthy one. Nobody needs results ASAP
> and there is no evidence whatsoever of fraud.
Elections should be held to a higher standard than merely “no positive evidence of fraud”. We should demand everything reasonable has been done to make fraud as hard as possible. I think elections in Australia meet that standard (and probably several other countries too, such as New Zealand and Germany). I think Brazil, and the US, among others, fail it. Their election systems fail to take every reasonable measure to prevent fraud, and hence fraud is inherently more likely - and the absence of any specific evidence does nothing to alter that conclusion. Even in the absence of any specific evidence, claims of fraud are more likely to be true in a system which makes fraud easier
Why are you downvoted? This is a great post that provides a lot of context and references. I wasn't aware of some of these facts. Thank you.
I'd like to make sure you know you aren't alone on this site. Even here on HN people will downvote to suppress views they disagree with instead of actually refuting any points raised. This can give posters the wrong impression.
I appreciate the verve and detailed view into something I'd recoil from just because of the polarization attached.
I mean this in the nicest, least combative, way possible: I don't understand at all how this would help with vote auditing. How does printing a piece of paper, which remains in the possession of the machine, ease any concerns about fraud generally, or enable an individual to audit?
The paper vote records (anomymous, of course) become the source of truth. There are very well established methods (Risk-limiting Audits - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit) that can randomly sample a small fraction of the ballots to guarantee with high probability that the electronic results are correct. Without paper records, the source of truth lies with the code that was run to receive and register the votes, and that is almost impossible to verify and fully trust.
Election day is open to oversight from all political parties. All parties send their people (identified with badges, previously registered with the voting authority) and they have free access to all voting locations.
At the end of the day, the bag of paper votes is transported with their oversight (multiple parties from opposing sides) to a public place where all of them will count the papers, together, in a public session, with cameras.
It's actually what already happens when the e-voting machines fail and your backup also fails. You cast votes with paper and the votes are counted with this exact same process, with oversight from all parties.
The other two are superior courts, but they don't rule constitutional matters.
The reasons were (you can confirm by clicking on the link above):
Security and Secrecy of the Vote: The court argued that the printed vote would not maintain the current standard of security provided by exclusively electronic voting. The paper trail could potentially pose a risk to the secrecy of the vote, with the possibility of identifying which voter chose which candidate. This could threaten the free choice of the voters.
[I find this argument ridiculous to be honest. The paper trail is anonymous and there's no way it violates the secrecy of the vote]
Operational Difficulties and Costs: The court also noted the significant difficulties and high costs associated with implementing a paper trail. They argued that the potential benefits associated with the security of the electoral process were minuscule compared to the detriments stemming from the implementation of the measure.
Rapid Implementation: The court deemed that the law, which called for the immediate implementation of the paper trail in 2018, failed to consider the necessary time and resources for proper setup.
[For a country the size of Brazil, the 1 billion BRL (200 million USD) is actually cheap if it avoids the political distrust that the current e-voting system has - see what happened in January 8th with the invasion of Congress and the Supreme Court].
Could not agree more. I think one big problem with Bolsonaro's discourse about the election system -- he was absolutely correct that the current system is not fully verifiable -- is that it became too politicized, and that he or his supporters took this to mean that the election should not be trusted. This automatically made anyone arguing to improve the system be lumped in with those sewing doubts about the result, which eventually led to the backlash from the TSE and the whole Jan 8th debacle.
One big problem with the electoral court in Brazil is that it is the only public branch that concentrates the three powers in one entity: they legislate about elections, they execute the rules, and they judge any matters related to the election. As a result, they have chosen these arguments to shoot down any criticism or improvement suggestions to the election system.
The country deserves a non-politicized discussion on the ground of true technical and security merits of what the election system should be. Paper records with Risk-limiting audits would solve most of the problems. I agree with your [comments] above. The costs of implementing this pale in comparison to the benefits of having a more reliable voting process which is the basis of a strong democracy.
Brazil has 4 "Superior" Courts and 1 "Supreme" Court above them. Superior Courts are the issue-specific Superior Military Court, the Superior Labor Court, the Superior Electoral Court and the general Superior Justice Court. Above them the Supreme Federal Court.
As a software engineer and a huge fan of technology in general, I think electronic voting machines are the devil. Digital information is too easy to alter. Good old-fashioned paper elections are a well vetted technology that we know how to use and can be implemented and audited well. Electronic voting, not so much. It's not just important to have a free election, it's important that everyone has faith that it was a free election. Because if people no longer believe in the process, democracy will die. So it has to be transparent, audited by neutral and external parties, and it has to not just be impossible to tamper with, it also has to make everyone believe that it is impossible.
I hope the will of the people prevails over the supreme court in Brazil eventually.
All US CPUs are backdoored by Silicon Valley. Any data or computation can be changed, deleted or stolen. It uses radio, works even without Net access, including for BR voting machines.
There will be no computing freedom until the silicon trojans embedded in all US designed CPUs are removed.
If you want freedom, you will have to ensure that no unseen radiation is enabling remote control of your devices.
Ask me anything about BadBIOS and hardware trojans.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Can you point me at it?
You might be interested in this: https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/indian-election-machines
One size does not fit all (threat models).
Yeah. I see these laymen on social media asking for source code without even understanding what source code even is. This is supposed to be a trustworthy, transparent system?
I agree with Germany's take on the matter: voting machines should be unconstitutional because citizens don't fully understand how it works. It's that simple. That's how a civilized country is supposed to work. Instead we have this circus where these judge-kings claim the machines are "unquestionable" and censor and fine and punish and ban from politics anyone who dares question anything.
In my country, New Zealand, we have fast reliable vote counting and it is all paper based and counted by hand. I don't understand how electronic systems make voting less complicated or cheaper.
We also have advanced (early) voting. You can vote one or two weeks early, election day is stress free.
Early votes counting starts at 9am in election day. So by the time that polls close most prelimary counting is already done.
The official count does take a couple of weeks, but around 10pm enough of the preliminary count is done that most electrotes have a winner.
Brazil is area is 32x bigger than NZ, 42x bigger population. We have election results 5h after election ends and there is no evidence whatsoever of fraud.
> Brazil is area is 32x bigger than NZ, 42x bigger population.
How is that relevant? Australia is 29x the area of New Zealand and 5x the population; and like New Zealand, it uses paper-based instead of electronic voting. I see no reason why a paper-based process can’t be scaled to work for a country of any size, even one bigger than Brazil.
> We have election results 5h after election ends
A slower but more trustworthy process is superior to a faster but less trustworthy one. Nobody needs results ASAP
> and there is no evidence whatsoever of fraud.
Elections should be held to a higher standard than merely “no positive evidence of fraud”. We should demand everything reasonable has been done to make fraud as hard as possible. I think elections in Australia meet that standard (and probably several other countries too, such as New Zealand and Germany). I think Brazil, and the US, among others, fail it. Their election systems fail to take every reasonable measure to prevent fraud, and hence fraud is inherently more likely - and the absence of any specific evidence does nothing to alter that conclusion. Even in the absence of any specific evidence, claims of fraud are more likely to be true in a system which makes fraud easier
2 replies →
Why are you downvoted? This is a great post that provides a lot of context and references. I wasn't aware of some of these facts. Thank you.
I'd like to make sure you know you aren't alone on this site. Even here on HN people will downvote to suppress views they disagree with instead of actually refuting any points raised. This can give posters the wrong impression.
I appreciate the verve and detailed view into something I'd recoil from just because of the polarization attached.
I mean this in the nicest, least combative, way possible: I don't understand at all how this would help with vote auditing. How does printing a piece of paper, which remains in the possession of the machine, ease any concerns about fraud generally, or enable an individual to audit?
The paper vote records (anomymous, of course) become the source of truth. There are very well established methods (Risk-limiting Audits - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit) that can randomly sample a small fraction of the ballots to guarantee with high probability that the electronic results are correct. Without paper records, the source of truth lies with the code that was run to receive and register the votes, and that is almost impossible to verify and fully trust.
Election day is open to oversight from all political parties. All parties send their people (identified with badges, previously registered with the voting authority) and they have free access to all voting locations.
At the end of the day, the bag of paper votes is transported with their oversight (multiple parties from opposing sides) to a public place where all of them will count the papers, together, in a public session, with cameras.
It's actually what already happens when the e-voting machines fail and your backup also fails. You cast votes with paper and the votes are counted with this exact same process, with oversight from all parties.
Why did the Supreme Court rules against it? And which Supreme Court (doesn’t Brazil have three)?
Brazil has one supreme court (STF).
The other two are superior courts, but they don't rule constitutional matters.
The reasons were (you can confirm by clicking on the link above):
Security and Secrecy of the Vote: The court argued that the printed vote would not maintain the current standard of security provided by exclusively electronic voting. The paper trail could potentially pose a risk to the secrecy of the vote, with the possibility of identifying which voter chose which candidate. This could threaten the free choice of the voters.
[I find this argument ridiculous to be honest. The paper trail is anonymous and there's no way it violates the secrecy of the vote]
Operational Difficulties and Costs: The court also noted the significant difficulties and high costs associated with implementing a paper trail. They argued that the potential benefits associated with the security of the electoral process were minuscule compared to the detriments stemming from the implementation of the measure.
Rapid Implementation: The court deemed that the law, which called for the immediate implementation of the paper trail in 2018, failed to consider the necessary time and resources for proper setup.
[For a country the size of Brazil, the 1 billion BRL (200 million USD) is actually cheap if it avoids the political distrust that the current e-voting system has - see what happened in January 8th with the invasion of Congress and the Supreme Court].
Could not agree more. I think one big problem with Bolsonaro's discourse about the election system -- he was absolutely correct that the current system is not fully verifiable -- is that it became too politicized, and that he or his supporters took this to mean that the election should not be trusted. This automatically made anyone arguing to improve the system be lumped in with those sewing doubts about the result, which eventually led to the backlash from the TSE and the whole Jan 8th debacle.
One big problem with the electoral court in Brazil is that it is the only public branch that concentrates the three powers in one entity: they legislate about elections, they execute the rules, and they judge any matters related to the election. As a result, they have chosen these arguments to shoot down any criticism or improvement suggestions to the election system.
The country deserves a non-politicized discussion on the ground of true technical and security merits of what the election system should be. Paper records with Risk-limiting audits would solve most of the problems. I agree with your [comments] above. The costs of implementing this pale in comparison to the benefits of having a more reliable voting process which is the basis of a strong democracy.
1 reply →
Brazil has 4 "Superior" Courts and 1 "Supreme" Court above them. Superior Courts are the issue-specific Superior Military Court, the Superior Labor Court, the Superior Electoral Court and the general Superior Justice Court. Above them the Supreme Federal Court.
What were the Supreme Courts reasons for deeming this unconstitutional?
The claim that the current system, including the current eVault, is good enough.
That can hardly be an argument to rule something new as "unconstitutional".
I'm going to need to assume that this is an oversimplifying summary then?
2 replies →