Paul Koning wrote on Sat, 10 Oct 2015 11:44:58 -0400: > > On Oct 9, 2015, at 5:39 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: > > [noticed voter ID terminal had cable to voting machines!] > > That's not the real problem.
Indeed, not *the* problem but just *a* problem I noticed while still in line to get into the voting station. > The real problem is that you had no way to be sure, no way to verify, > that the machine was recording your vote and would accurately report > it later. It might just as easily report numbers that someone had told > it to report, not connected to any reality. How would you know? If > anyone were to question this, how would you prove that the count is > honest? This issue was raised, so the third time these machines were used in a national election there was a pilot with modified machines that printed their results so that the voter could see (but not touch) and then dropped the paper version into an urn. Observers from all the different parties could use the paper trail to verify the numbers presented electronically by the machines. After that single trial, TSE declared that the result was that a paper trail was proved to be unnecessary and caused delays and added expense, so those machines were never seen again and elections in Brazil have been paper free ever since. There are several aspects of voting culture in Brazil that are quite different than in many other countries and any proposals have to take that into account. Voting is mandatory, for example. If you can't prove that you voted in the last two elections (or were officially excused due to travel or something like that) then you can't get a passport and suffer a few other restrictions. There are a lot of people who would like to buy people's votes and, historically, many powerful people would force all their employees to vote for their own candidates. This means that any scheme that would allow somebody to prove how they voted would be completely rejected, here. Even doing stuff like taking a picture of the machine's screen with your cell phone to show how you voted is one of the few things that can land you in jail on election day. Here is an example of a scheme that would work in some countries, but would not be an option in Brazil: just generate a random number and store it with the vote. You print out the random number and give it to the voter to take him. Then you make the final contents of the machine available online. The voter can go through that at home and check that their random number is paired with their actual vote. They have to suppose that will also be the case for everyone else. They can manually add all the votes for that machine (or any other they are interested in) and compare with the final report for that machine. This protects against fraud, but not against being forced to prove to somebody (other than yourself) how you voted. -- Jecel
