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Or the compromise (or cooperation) of a few of the software supply chain components used to program the chipset of the voting machines. Or the development machi

Or the compromise (or cooperation) of a few of the software supply chain components used to program the chipset of the voting machines. Or the development machines used to write and upload the voting software. Or the foundry used to cast the chips. You think if e.g. China devoted ~5 years of their best hacking group's time to this, they couldn't do it? Because that's a very low price to pay to sway the election of a country such as Brazil. > They are audited by members of parties and the civil society. Audited how? Do they plug in a USB, download the software, and verify that it matches the (hopefully open-source, ideally formally verified) code it's supposed to be running? Let's say it matches - how can they trust that the code the USB port emitted, is what is actually running?

tiagobraw 4y ago
they seize random voting machines from polling sessions and input a known amount of votes for each candidate and match them with the ending totals. (just one kind of audit they do)
- tarakat 4y ago
  VW was able to detect when an emissions test was being done, so there may be ways to detect this as well. E.g. by the unusually fast rate at which votes are being cast, or if this "seizure" involves moving the machine, reconnecting power to it, or any other kind of abnormal interaction. Why make things so complicated when manual counting works perfectly well?? With auditing being so difficult, you're not even saving any labor.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. Manual counting does not work well. I cannot stress this enough. Manual counting in the past has meant much work, rework, terror, confusion and rampant fraud and miscounting. Brazil is a gigantic country with over 150 million electors spread across an area larger than western Europe and with a population much more diverse than that. The labour and the complexity involved in producing the machines and auditing is nothing compared to what manual counting was.
    - tarakat 4y ago
      Can you be more specific? I know that population or geographic size alone has no effect on counting complexity - the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted. Communicating the vote totals from electoral districts can be done through the same medium as the voting machines would use, and producing final sums takes only O(log n) parallel steps. So where does the terror, confusion, and rampant fraud come from, and what is it about Brazil that causes them, when so many other countries manage to avoid them?
      - cassianoleal 4y ago
        > the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted Each new person is a new liability. Complexity and likelihood of mistakes do grow with number of votes. People tick ambiguous boxes for executive functions (somehwere between 2 candidates). How do you count that? People write numbers or names of legislative candidates. Sometimes it's illegible. Sometimes more than one candidate share the same first name or surname and the voter only wrote one. How do you count that? The people counting the votes are members of the civil society. They're working for free in horrible conditions (hot and humid, hard chairs, pressure to finish and go back home). They're tired. They're hungry. They're thirsty. They've been many hours speaking only with a bunch of other people whom they've only met in the day and some of them are fervorously against their ideology. They make mistakes. A lot of times they miscount on purpose. In certain regions, the "colonel" (like a local caudillo, usually a big farmer with a lot of properties and the entire town dependent on him) will not let people leave the counting place until his candidate has an acceptable count. People leave boxes blank. The person counting ticks their favourite candidate and scores a new vote. Fiscals from parties question decisions about all the above. Sometimes there's need to recount. The problems above compound. Criteria for counting ambiguous votes may change during the course of the counting. Do you recount everything? Do you just pretend it's ok to change criteria depending on what results you have this far? It also makes everything messier and take much longer. There's a reason we move away from paper-based ledgers. Those reasons also apply here but at much larger scale. This is just a glimpse of the problems. They're much larger and deeper than I could convey in a forum post.

tiagobraw 4y ago

they seize random voting machines from polling sessions and input a known amount of votes for each candidate and match them with the ending totals. (just one kind of audit they do)

tarakat 4y ago
VW was able to detect when an emissions test was being done, so there may be ways to detect this as well. E.g. by the unusually fast rate at which votes are being cast, or if this "seizure" involves moving the machine, reconnecting power to it, or any other kind of abnormal interaction. Why make things so complicated when manual counting works perfectly well?? With auditing being so difficult, you're not even saving any labor.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. Manual counting does not work well. I cannot stress this enough. Manual counting in the past has meant much work, rework, terror, confusion and rampant fraud and miscounting. Brazil is a gigantic country with over 150 million electors spread across an area larger than western Europe and with a population much more diverse than that. The labour and the complexity involved in producing the machines and auditing is nothing compared to what manual counting was.
  - tarakat 4y ago
    Can you be more specific? I know that population or geographic size alone has no effect on counting complexity - the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted. Communicating the vote totals from electoral districts can be done through the same medium as the voting machines would use, and producing final sums takes only O(log n) parallel steps. So where does the terror, confusion, and rampant fraud come from, and what is it about Brazil that causes them, when so many other countries manage to avoid them?
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      > the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted Each new person is a new liability. Complexity and likelihood of mistakes do grow with number of votes. People tick ambiguous boxes for executive functions (somehwere between 2 candidates). How do you count that? People write numbers or names of legislative candidates. Sometimes it's illegible. Sometimes more than one candidate share the same first name or surname and the voter only wrote one. How do you count that? The people counting the votes are members of the civil society. They're working for free in horrible conditions (hot and humid, hard chairs, pressure to finish and go back home). They're tired. They're hungry. They're thirsty. They've been many hours speaking only with a bunch of other people whom they've only met in the day and some of them are fervorously against their ideology. They make mistakes. A lot of times they miscount on purpose. In certain regions, the "colonel" (like a local caudillo, usually a big farmer with a lot of properties and the entire town dependent on him) will not let people leave the counting place until his candidate has an acceptable count. People leave boxes blank. The person counting ticks their favourite candidate and scores a new vote. Fiscals from parties question decisions about all the above. Sometimes there's need to recount. The problems above compound. Criteria for counting ambiguous votes may change during the course of the counting. Do you recount everything? Do you just pretend it's ok to change criteria depending on what results you have this far? It also makes everything messier and take much longer. There's a reason we move away from paper-based ledgers. Those reasons also apply here but at much larger scale. This is just a glimpse of the problems. They're much larger and deeper than I could convey in a forum post.