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

I noticed Globo/Folha/et al haven't reported on this despite it having been revealed in December of last year.

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On a side note...

Anyone who speaks Portuguese, I recommend the documentary "Vocação do Poder", that follows 6 electorial candidates in Rio while on the campaign trail. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI8_oz6lsbE

For those who don't speak Portuguese, search out the documentary "Send a Bullet" which looks at crime and fraud in Brazil.

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 process, the court refused to pay and even condemned the candidate for "bad faith litigation" for asking for an investigation and not paying for it(despite showing inconsistent ballot data).

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. We have no way to tell if our votes has been correctly collected nor the political parties that the votes were correctly summed, thus impossible to make a recount. In a voting system where you are not sure on whom your vote was recorded and the Election Court goes against political parties that accuse it, IMHO thats a true threat to democracy.

For a safer election it must include a voter-verified paper audit trail, a VVPAT allows voters the possibility to verify that their votes are cast as intended and can serve as an additional barrier to changing or destroying votes.

German and Holland Court already banned this first generation eletronic ballot box for not being secure enough, and Brazil is the only country on the world who still uses it.

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 would need to do a manual count independent of the electronic count, and the judiciary could oversee a wrap-up ceremony where the two were compared for correctness.

In order to rig a vote and get away with it, you'd need to hack both the computer system and the manual count. Chavez could do it, but joe random hacker definitely couldn't.

But you'd get a fast, clear result for television purposes. Voting cards would not be ambiguously filled in the way they are now. And if you had a compulsory preferential system, as in some jurisdictions now, you could cause the software to enforce that in a way that isn't possible with manual entry at the moment.