6 ms·

Any details on the infrastructure behind this? How are they handling security?

frozenlettuce 4y ago
That's a sensitive topic, as Bolsonaro has questioning the voting machine security. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil Even Tom Scott's video about electronic voting shows in Brazil with a warning saying that "electronic voting is safe" (the same type of warning that shows up for conspiracy theories). We had no problems with those machines since 1996. My take is that he does that to mobilize his support base. One curious thing is that the centralized voting counting is done with an Oracle system. Some politicians questioned the contracts value, and why AWS or Google cloud weren't considered - authorities argued that only Oracle supported Oracle's cloud : )
- bigbluedots 4y ago
  > We had no problems with those machines since 1996. None that have been discovered yet at least!
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    13 elections in one of the largest countries in the world and not a single issue has surfaced. Probability says issues have happened but the fact that none have surfaced suggests they're negligible.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > We had no problems with those machines since 1996. This is the kind of thinking that gets you to "less than 1% of rape accusations are false". How do you know you don't have any problems?
  - frozenlettuce 4y ago
    Each party has delegates present during vote counting, in state and city level. That only became an issue recently. That said, I do believe that the system would be better if physical counting could be performed as well, to increase public trust and to avoid the same situation in 82 fraud against Brizola.
    - tarakat 4y ago
      > Each party has delegates present during vote counting [..] the system would be better if physical counting could be performed as well If there's no physical counting, then what are the delegates observing? If the machines were compromised, how could they tell?
      - Matheus28 4y ago
        I believe they also have a button to spit out current vote count for each candidate, obviously still possible for the code to detect when that button is being used a lot to check if it's counting properly. It's tricky because votes are meant to be secret (and voters aren't allowed to have proof of who they voted for, so they can't be coerced into revealing it), while at the same time you want the system to be secure.
      - frozenlettuce 4y ago
        You have the total of votes per machine. In looking at these locations local candidates have a good notion on how well their party is going to perform. Things that call their attention are the "bumps" like the one by the end of last US election. When that happens, they can signal the voting machine to be isolated and call in an electoral judge.
        tarakat 4y ago
        Sounds easy to evade. Once a machine has recorded 10+ votes since the last time it outputted a count, it could start giving a small probabilistic advantage to a preferred candidate, at the expense of other candidates. There would be no bumps, and the results would never differ by more than, say, relative 20% from the real count. E.g. if preferred candidate got 10% on one voting machine, it would give him 12%, taking the other 2% from all other candidates. No bumps or disproportionate popularity in traditionally unpopular regions to raise suspicion.
- biscoito 4y ago
  It's also nice to note that there have been already security audits on the current system, TPS (The public security test for TSE the Superior Electoral Court) happens every year addressing the security of e-voting in Brazil, for example, on TPS 2017, people managed to find arbitrary code execution in the Urna Eletronica (That's how we call the e-voting system here) Great content to read: https://urnaeletronica.info/ https://urnaeletronica.info/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326261911_Execucao_de_codigo_arbitrario_na_urna_eletronica_brasileira https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326261911_Execucao_... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323470546_The_Return_of_Software_Vulnerabilities_in_the_Brazilian_Voting_Machine https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323470546_The_Retur... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914587_The_Good_the_Bad_and_the_Ugly_Two_Decades_of_E-Voting_in_Brazil https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914587_The_Good_...
gabriel34 4y ago
Security audits and supervisors from all parties in all steps for starters. The voting machine prints a total for that machine at the same time that the votes are transferred to the central counting, this process is public, the supervisor from each party get a copy of the total, and one copy is publicly affixed at the voting place, so parallel aggregating from the partial counts is possible (and has been done by sampling). Internal counting on the voting machine is somewhat validated by picking random voting machines out of the voting places and conducting a parallel voting, publicly broadcasted, on which known amount of votes for each candidate are input and the result from the machine is compared to the expected. Only thing missing that I can think of is actually doing this parallel voting on the same time and place the voting was expected to take place.

That's a sensitive topic, as Bolsonaro has questioning the voting machine security. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil Even Tom Scott's video about electronic voting shows in Brazil with a warning saying that "electronic voting is safe" (the same type of warning that shows up for conspiracy theories). We had no problems with those machines since 1996. My take is that he does that to mobilize his support base. One curious thing is that the centralized voting counting is done with an Oracle system. Some politicians questioned the contracts value, and why AWS or Google cloud weren't considered - authorities argued that only Oracle supported Oracle's cloud : )

bigbluedots 4y ago
> We had no problems with those machines since 1996. None that have been discovered yet at least!
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  13 elections in one of the largest countries in the world and not a single issue has surfaced. Probability says issues have happened but the fact that none have surfaced suggests they're negligible.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> We had no problems with those machines since 1996. This is the kind of thinking that gets you to "less than 1% of rape accusations are false". How do you know you don't have any problems?
- frozenlettuce 4y ago
  Each party has delegates present during vote counting, in state and city level. That only became an issue recently. That said, I do believe that the system would be better if physical counting could be performed as well, to increase public trust and to avoid the same situation in 82 fraud against Brizola.
  - tarakat 4y ago
    > Each party has delegates present during vote counting [..] the system would be better if physical counting could be performed as well If there's no physical counting, then what are the delegates observing? If the machines were compromised, how could they tell?
    - Matheus28 4y ago
      I believe they also have a button to spit out current vote count for each candidate, obviously still possible for the code to detect when that button is being used a lot to check if it's counting properly. It's tricky because votes are meant to be secret (and voters aren't allowed to have proof of who they voted for, so they can't be coerced into revealing it), while at the same time you want the system to be secure.
    - frozenlettuce 4y ago
      You have the total of votes per machine. In looking at these locations local candidates have a good notion on how well their party is going to perform. Things that call their attention are the "bumps" like the one by the end of last US election. When that happens, they can signal the voting machine to be isolated and call in an electoral judge.
      - tarakat 4y ago
        Sounds easy to evade. Once a machine has recorded 10+ votes since the last time it outputted a count, it could start giving a small probabilistic advantage to a preferred candidate, at the expense of other candidates. There would be no bumps, and the results would never differ by more than, say, relative 20% from the real count. E.g. if preferred candidate got 10% on one voting machine, it would give him 12%, taking the other 2% from all other candidates. No bumps or disproportionate popularity in traditionally unpopular regions to raise suspicion.
biscoito 4y ago
It's also nice to note that there have been already security audits on the current system, TPS (The public security test for TSE the Superior Electoral Court) happens every year addressing the security of e-voting in Brazil, for example, on TPS 2017, people managed to find arbitrary code execution in the Urna Eletronica (That's how we call the e-voting system here) Great content to read: https://urnaeletronica.info/ https://urnaeletronica.info/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326261911_Execucao_de_codigo_arbitrario_na_urna_eletronica_brasileira https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326261911_Execucao_... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323470546_The_Return_of_Software_Vulnerabilities_in_the_Brazilian_Voting_Machine https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323470546_The_Retur... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914587_The_Good_the_Bad_and_the_Ugly_Two_Decades_of_E-Voting_in_Brazil https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914587_The_Good_...

gabriel34 4y ago

Security audits and supervisors from all parties in all steps for starters. The voting machine prints a total for that machine at the same time that the votes are transferred to the central counting, this process is public, the supervisor from each party get a copy of the total, and one copy is publicly affixed at the voting place, so parallel aggregating from the partial counts is possible (and has been done by sampling). Internal counting on the voting machine is somewhat validated by picking random voting machines out of the voting places and conducting a parallel voting, publicly broadcasted, on which known amount of votes for each candidate are input and the result from the machine is compared to the expected. Only thing missing that I can think of is actually doing this parallel voting on the same time and place the voting was expected to take place.