Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

A few points of interest for those who aren't familiar w/ brazilian politics:

- as the link shows, brazilian political parties are numerous, so general elections typically have multiple candidates. There's no electoral college.

- voting is mandatory in Brazil. In the 2018 presidential elections, there were ~117M voters. By comparison, the last US presidential election saw turnout of 158M voters.

- Brazil has used electronic voting since 1996. General public sentiment towards it has historically always been positive. No instance of fraud has ever been surfaced and the system produces results extremely quickly (as in, within the same day).

- Recently the president has been questioning its security, but for some context on his political platform, he also held a similar stance to Trump on the topic of Covid and has been criticized over his position saying deforestation is good for economy. He's still the favorite candidate. The second most popular candidate (Lula) has a long history of controversy (one of the most high profile being him being implicated in investigations related to the impeachment of the previous president Dilma). As you can imagine, many brazilians are cynical about the country's political system. Take that as you will.

The machines were not a problem when he won the first time.

> voting is mandatory in Brazil

What happens if you don't vote?

If you miss a few elections, you get put into a blacklist and can't get a passport, work for the government and a few other things.

However, the fine for missing an election is ridiculous. It's something like 1 dollar. If you don't want to vote, you can stay at home and then pay this fine, but there is a caveat: 100% of this fine's value goes to Fundo Eleitoral, which is a fund managed by the parties and meant to be used for their publicity. In other words: you put money in an instrument that's probably corrupt.

You just have to file a note explaining that you could not vote -- we call it "justifying the (non-) vote" / "justificar o voto". As of the current election, the it can be done on a mobile app.

You get a R$ 3,51 fine, around US$ 0.65.

If you don't pay the fine you can't apply for public jobs, if already a government employee you can't receive a salary, can't issue a passport, and other restrictions. Nowadays you can justify the absence using a cellphone.

Other people already explained the base case, but also: for voters who are out of the town were they originally enlisted, it just a matter of going to any poll station and filling a justify form. It is usually quicker than voting but, as the voter can not do it at the enlisted town, it is not an alternative.

Voting is also highly distributed, on most towns no voter has to travel more than 1 or 2 km to get to their assigned polling station (if they enlisted to the station nearest to their homes, of course). Every voting zone is split in a number of "voting sections", every one with a single voting machine, and the number of section/machines per zone is mostly proportional to the number of voters, so queues are not that common; unless people group in some particularly unfortunate times ... local jokes say to NEVER vote at the opening hours, or you will be stuck on a line of senior citizens (who also have the right of jumping the queue, defined by law).

Also, everything is defined with months of advance, so there are no surprises on where to vote.

There is a lot of safeguards to prevent fraud (we had a lot of time to learn this by the hard way) but the bad part is these also prevent some nice things (quickly moving your enlistment to another town/zone/section, mail voting, etc... even transit voting is very limited because you will need to know where you will be long before the poll).

It's still winner takes all, so sure, "political parties are numerous" yet all but two are hopeless.

The only people so worried about voting machines and voting fraud are frauds themselves who wouldn't win without disenfranchising a large swath of voters.

This makes no sense. Voting fraud is a real worry, especially when the competition is known to have no ethics and ignore any rule they can.

Just because nobody is doing it now doesn't mean you should not be worrying about it.

Agreed. Show up at the polls in person with government issued ID that has your picture and indicates if you are a Citizen and your address. That ID is then matched to an online database. No more of this mail in vote. Not one Citizen should have to worry about the accuracy of the vote.

Indeed. The system as a whole has so many protections that it's very hard to defraud it. It's certainly possible but it gets harder each year.

The CCC (Chaos Computer Club, which are one of the largest hacker collectives in Germany) area also sceptical about electronic voting machines and have been campaigning against them for roughly 20 years. Id definitely not call the CCC "frauds".

Since 2009, electronic voting machines are illegal in Germany. The argument of our constitutional court is that every single voter needs to be able to understand how our voting system works without being an expert.

https://wahlcomputer.ccc.de/

Brazil has a different threat model than Germany.

I made no comment on the Brazil election, because I have no information about even how elections look like in Brazil.

I was just commenting on the statement that only fraudsters would be against electronic voting machines.

There was rampant fraud and miscounting during the counting of votes prior to the electronic machines in Brazil.

The people might have understood how their vote worked (they put a cross next to an executive candidate, and write the number or name of the candidates for the legislative) but that's nowhere near understanding how the whole system works.

The people who used to benefit from the paper ballots (the fraudsters) are the ones claiming for its return.

I suspect that's what that statement was about, given that this HN article is about the Brazilian elections.

Thank you for the information.

As a side question, if I may ask: In Germany every person is allowed to be an observer of the count and watch how votes are counted and tallied. Was this not possible in Brazil beforehand?

Or more to the point: What made it possible to defraud the count of votes?

Yes, it was possible to observe, and many people did. In fact, it drew a lot of interest and there were usually many observers per ballot... in big population centers.

But it is also incredibly hard to make sure every counted vote gets observed in a country of 150 million voters and where the polling location are as different as a boat in a minor river in the Amazon serving a semi-isolated tribe that barely speak the country's official language and a consulate in Ramallah. Ballots have to be transported, counted and recounted over a period of days.

If somewhere along the third day of counting someone exchanges 50 votes from a ballot and you saw it, what do you do? Your word against his? What if he threatens you with violence? Etc.

Electronic elections, even though they are a bit of a black box, solved all those very real, very practical problems.

> The argument of our constitutional court is that every single voter needs to be able to understand how our voting system works without being an expert.

It doesn't take an expert to understand that you click on a machine, it prints a receipt which you can verify has the correct thing written on it, and you put that receipt in a box. When counting, the paper receipts can be counted, or used as a statistical check if machines report numbers directly. There's nothing complicated in that.

You are mostly correct, but a bit misinformed in two topics. One, the favourite in all the credible polls is Lula. Second, the impeachment of Dilma was due to irregular monetary policy, while Lula was investigated for unrelated corruption charges. And please do not forget to mention that Lula's guilty verdict was invalidated on the basis that the judge was himself corrupt- so now Lula is presumed innocent.

>was invalidated on the basis that the judge was himself corrupt

No, firstly the legal system changed and the veredicts given were considered insufficient for conviction. Then, they were annulled based on being outside the court's jurisdiction.

So Lula was still corrupt as all hell, it was just that he was convicted in the wrong court..

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