Thousands of Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday to vote for the country’s next president. Incumbent head of state Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva appears to be well on the path for reelection though controversy over corruption and fighting within the Workers Party may prevent him from avoiding a second round against his closest rival.Tomorrow’s elections will rely heavily on Diebold electronic voting machines (image) that Brazilian electoral officials are hoping will prevent fraud and a slow vote count. However, there is worry over the ease in which Diebold machines can be hacked as has been shown by Princeton University researchers and testimony provided at the U.S. Congress a few days ago. Similar types of Diebold machines raised eyebrows during the 2004
Links- Irish Examiner, Angus Reid Consultants, Fox News, Endgadget, ZNet, Mother Jones
Image- Bonde News (
Tags- Brazil, election, technology, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
2 comments:
What a piece of crap this post!!!
You just don't have any information about the BR voting system to write about it.
Electronic voting in BR was implemented way back in 1996. It was so successful that nobody in BR discusses its efficiency anymore.
FYI, here the election works:
1 - Each machine arrives to a voting site sealed. At 8 a.m. the machine prints out the results showing 0 votes recorded. This record is signed by witnesses and saved. From this point on the room continuously has observers, until 5 p.m. when voting ends. At that point anyone who stands in line still gets to vote using a special password and as I understand their IDs are recorded. When voting ends the machine prints out another paper with results in several copies, which are all signed. One is posted in the window of the polling place, another one is sent to the central office. The diskette is removed from the machine (the seal is broken), signed, and also sent to the central office.
2 - The machine comes with a list of names and registration numbers of all voters in the precinct. If your number is not in the system, you don't get to vote (this happens very rarely). Once you "confirm," you can't re-vote.
3 - The election committee also writes up a report which lists anything unusual that happened during the day (e.g. "a disruptive voter was removed by police," "a voter argued with a committee member about use of a cell phone," etc.)
All that serves to make it nearly impossible for local elections officials to modify the results. They can't do anything to the machine before the vote since they need to make sure they get a clean print out at 8 a.m. They can't vote for other people or for extra people since they would need the voter registration numbers for that – this is a kind of ID for elections, you are not allow to vote if you don’t present a photo ID or your voter’s number ID. Also, everyone is assigned to a pre-determined voter place based on your home address. You cannot vote in another place because you won’t be listed. Finally, they immediately publish the final printout, so that while the counting is done automatically by the central office you can in theory do a recount using precinct data (each precinct seems to have around 500 people).
So as you can see the process is safe and it avoids fraud. Even if a ballot is violated this would affect about 500 votes, so this is not enough to change the curse of an election. Please notice that in Brazil all elections are based in Popular Vote. There is no district or electoral vote as in US, what makes impossible to anyone to fraud an entire presidential election.
I hope this comment will contribute to make people more knowledgeable about Brazil’s election process and the efficiency of the electronic voting.
Clay
jack21kk@yahoo.com
FYI:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7644751.stm
Clay
jack21kk@yahoo.com
Post a Comment