Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

translate.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 46 posts

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#31

Post by jeltz »

diego_moita wrote: post #16

The real issue here is not if voting machines are the perfect solution, it is about what is the better solution. And if anyone knows voter fraud in Brazil, these machines are a lot better than the manual system. At least it demands the people committing the fraud to be a lot smarter than they used to be in manual counting.

What kind of fraud was committed with the manual counting? Here in Sweden I would be more worried about electronic voting than the current manual counting, but social pressures vary across cultures.

EDIT: There have been both allegations and convictions of election fraud in Sweden, but never anything related to the counting of votes.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#32

Post by marcosdumay »

dudus wrote: post #27
cturner wrote: post #10

Hey - I had an idea for how electronic voting could work. Voters would enter their vote into a computer. The computer would print out a card for you, and show it to you from behind a perspex card. You would then say "OK" to verify that it was correct and it would drop into a box. Now there'd be a physical copy of the cards. These could be counted and checked by scrutineers as the current electoral process works. They…

This seem like a lot more complicated and expensive. Why not just give the voter a unique hashed password that he can enter the internet and verify the vote that was computed for that password. Then the voters are the ones that will verify the election.

Because it does not make anybody sure that their vote was correctly added, and it will make it possible for the voter to prove to a third party how he voted.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#33

Post by a-priori »

cturner wrote: post #10

Hey - I had an idea for how electronic voting could work. Voters would enter their vote into a computer. The computer would print out a card for you, and show it to you from behind a perspex card. You would then say "OK" to verify that it was correct and it would drop into a box. Now there'd be a physical copy of the cards. These could be counted and checked by scrutineers as the current electoral process works. They…

Or you could do it all by paper. I hate to sound like a luddite here, but there's simply no place for electronics in the electoral process.

Paper is excellent for ballots. It's easy to understand (put a mark next to whoever you want to elect). It's easy to collect (put ballot in a box). It's easy to count (have multiple people look at ballot, tally result). It's easy to secure (seal the boxes, keep them in a secure location). It's easy to verify (unseal the boxes, count again). It's tamper evident (examine ballots closely). You can ensure that the whole process is fair by having observers physically present each step of the process watching for shenanigans.

The only downside is that it's labour-intensive. But really, that's minor. Accept that as the cost of being confident in the election results. There are fewer things more important in a democratic society than free and fair elections.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#34

Post by diego_moita »

jeltz wrote: post #31
diego_moita wrote: post #16

The real issue here is not if voting machines are the perfect solution, it is about what is the better solution. And if anyone knows voter fraud in Brazil, these machines are a lot better than the manual system. At least it demands the people committing the fraud to be a lot smarter than they used to be in manual counting.

What kind of fraud was committed with the manual counting? Here in Sweden I would be more worried about electronic voting than the current manual counting, but social pressures vary across cultures. EDIT: There have been both allegations and convictions of election fraud in Sweden, but never anything related to the counting of votes.

> What kind of fraud was committed with the manual counting? Here in Sweden

Trust me, your country is very different from the rest of the world and I mean that in a good sense (such as a parameter of good governance).

This a country with more than 180 million people and mandatory vote, elections here are massive. Every time someone touches a vote there is a chance for it to be defrauded or replaced. In the past, stories of lost and inflated ballots and replaced votes where trivial. Because a lot of the voters are poor another trick was to give to the voter an already marked vote and demand the original valid one back so the candidate could buy a vote in a election.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#35

Post by diego_moita »

a1a wrote: post #24
diego_moita wrote: post #16

The real issue here is not if voting machines are the perfect solution, it is about what is the better solution. And if anyone knows voter fraud in Brazil, these machines are a lot better than the manual system. At least it demands the people committing the fraud to be a lot smarter than they used to be in manual counting.

I have no knowledge what so ever about voter fraud in Brazil, but I am pretty certain it cannot be worse than using voting machines (See: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/SealsOnVotingMachi... ). I think there is many things in this world that "needs a chip", voting is however not one of them.

This is the 3rd world, things work different in here, this is a 180 million people country with mandatory vote. Before voting machines elections would take almost a month to have their results computed. During all this time the ballots were subject to be stolen, inflated or replaced. This was very common in Brazil up until the late 80's. Stories like this are much more uncommon today.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#36

Post by a-priori »

diego_moita wrote: post #35
a1a wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no knowledge what so ever about voter fraud in Brazil, but I am pretty certain it cannot be worse than using voting machines (See: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/SealsOnVotingMachi... ). I think there is many things in this world that "needs a chip", voting is however not one of them.

This is the 3rd world, things work different in here, this is a 180 million people country with mandatory vote. Before voting machines elections would take almost a month to have their results computed. During all this time the ballots were subject to be stolen, inflated or replaced. This was very common in Brazil up until the late 80's. Stories like this are much more uncommon today.

In Canada, we do elections by paper ballot. Yet, somehow, preliminary results are available on election election. That's when the winners are known for virtually every riding and therefore the prime minister is known as well. The final, validated results are available seven days later. I believe that Elections Canada is legally obliged to fulfill that seven day deadline: no more, no less.

Mind you, we have a population of 35 million people. But the size of the population doesn't matter: vote counting is an embarrassingly parallel problem.

The only explanation for election results taking a month is corruption, plain and simple. And voting machines will not solve that. Election fraud is a human problem and requires a human solution, not a technological one. If a nation cannot properly administer their own elections, then the people should insist that a third party (e.g. the UN) monitor them.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#37

Post by dserodio »

diego_moita wrote: post #35
a1a wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no knowledge what so ever about voter fraud in Brazil, but I am pretty certain it cannot be worse than using voting machines (See: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/SealsOnVotingMachi... ). I think there is many things in this world that "needs a chip", voting is however not one of them.

This is the 3rd world, things work different in here, this is a 180 million people country with mandatory vote. Before voting machines elections would take almost a month to have their results computed. During all this time the ballots were subject to be stolen, inflated or replaced. This was very common in Brazil up until the late 80's. Stories like this are much more uncommon today.

Yeah, but the stories may be much more uncommon not because it's safer, but because electronic fraud is much easier to conceal then physical fraud.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#38

Post by dserodio »

speeder wrote: post #12
DaviNunes wrote: post #8

Secureness of Brazilian voting system has been contested many times. There are "The Alagoas case" which the candidate Joao Lyra requested a recount because he found out 1/3 of the ballots contained incorrect data and then asked for an audit, the court demanded 2 million for this audition, Joao Lyra then asked the the court itself to pay for it, since it would be in its interest to demonstrate the fairness of the proc…

There is newer.cases, like a guy that took his family.to vote.for him, and claims he voted.on himself.and still.ended with zero.votes. He sued.TSE but the reply was that he probably typed wrong and confirmed.a.wrong person. Since there is no per vote paper ballot, it.is.his.word.against the judge word, so guess who win.

What's up with the period instead of a space to separate words?

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#39

Post by aylons »

sanoli wrote: post #19
aylons wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's true, our eletronic ballot prints the report but there is no way to check if the sum of digital records are the same as the printed reports Yes, there is: you can check the electronic records online and compare it against the printed reports. The other allegations are surely important to the voting transparency discussion, but are not related to the allegations on the OP.

The problem is, if you vote for candidate X, there's no way of checking if your vote was really computed or tampered with by the machine. The report will print something like 'candidate X = so many votes', but beyond that you can't know if that number was altered. If you had individual printouts on a ballot along with the electronic vote, you could have the ballot counted, and know. What if some wacko starts claiming…

This is part of the "other allegations". I'm not discussing them.

The allegation in the OP has nothing to do with this - he says he can change the results AFTER the ballots have printed the results.

Re: 19-year-old hacker reveals how he rigged voting machines and election in Brazil

#40

Post by jeltz »

diego_moita wrote: post #34
jeltz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fraud was committed with the manual counting? Here in Sweden I would be more worried about electronic voting than the current manual counting, but social pressures vary across cultures. EDIT: There have been both allegations and convictions of election fraud in Sweden, but never anything related to the counting of votes.

> What kind of fraud was committed with the manual counting? Here in Sweden Trust me, your country is very different from the rest of the world and I mean that in a good sense (such as a parameter of good governance). This a country with more than 180 million people and mandatory vote, elections here are massive. Every time someone touches a vote there is a chance for it to be defrauded or replaced. In the past, stor…

I still wonder if most of these problems could not be fixed by changing the manual system.

> Because a lot of the voters are poor another trick was to give to the voter an already marked vote and demand the original valid one back so the candidate could buy a vote in a election.

For example wouldn't it be trivial to make this impossible? Simply make sure people can get more than one paper and there would be no original vote that could be used as proof. They would have to have a guy standing there watching you which would work with voting machines too.

Post reply on HN