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Comment by loewenskind | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing really irritates me. Why are we piloting anything? Brazil has this solved! They have a system with much harder restrictions than what the US currently has [1] and their system has been working fine for years. Don't write a new one, just buy theirs!

[1] You must be able to prove that everyone has voted because those who haven't receive a fine. You must not be able to tie a vote to the person who cast it because if that can be done it could lead to serious consequences for voters.

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Why are people downvoting this? It seems a legitimate question to me.

loewenskind, can you provide links to more information?

I learned about it from a Brazilian who used to work with these machines. I'll have to ask him for something online (thought it may mostly be in Portuguese).

I see something about Brazil's electronic voting machines on Wikipedia, but not on an online system. Link?

Hrm, I've never tried to look it up before. I know about it from someone who used to work with it, but he told me other countries (including the US) had looked at it before with an eye toward purchasing.

The Brazilian election machines produce no paper receipt for the voter, nor any paper trail for a recount. There's no good way to audit an election result. Already this is a nonstarter for most election reform advocates.

I don't think a paper receipt is necessary if the system is trusted (the system gives feedback if it accepted your input). Recount paper trail is also a trust issue. The audit is a real issue, but I question how accurate the statement "There's no good way to audit an election result" is given the requirements to prove that everyone voted, etc.

In any case, at present it's up against something thrown together with Ruby on rails.

I tend to agree with you, but you asked why we didn't just buy the Brazilian system. And my guess is that's part of it.

Yes, that could well be. My friend said the US did invest it, so they know about it. Personally I would rather have a system like Brazil has today as a place to at least start from rather than the horrible way votes are done in the US today.

> I don't think a paper receipt is necessary if the system is trusted (the system gives feedback if it accepted your input).

Front-end: "vote counted!"

Back-end: vote redirected to /dev/null!

It's not immediately obvious to me how to make such a system transparent enough to convince the losers that they lost honestly. Cryptographic schemes may be able to solve it, but I think it's an open question whether they'll be convincing and secure in practice.

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