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Comment by rpgbr | Hacker News Reader

Wow, lots of comments discrediting digital election.

Brazilian authorities run open testing from time to time and fixes (tangencial so far) vulnerabilities. So far, there were zero proof that any hacking or flaw in our voting system. This only became an “issue” because discredit the election became part of Bolsonaro’s coup attempt. (Which is, btw, the authoritarian wannabe playbook.)

Anyway, you should witness the mess it was before, when votes were in paper and counting by hand. Frauds was widespread. I mean, look and the US election system… it’s a kind of meme in Brazil due to how rudimentary and prone to fraud.

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The testing is not open. Selected groups are invited, and it runs for a given length of time. To the point that obviously only so many flaws can be found, as the test environment is not realistic.

There are plenty of examples of flaws in the voting system. Most of them have been corrected, but not all.

Yes, fraud is widespread with paper voting. But it does not scale. One single flaw in an electronic voting system could scale to every single voting machine, thus impacting even presidential elections.

They're accounts operated from bot farms my dude!

They're rampant all over the internet. It costs a multi-billionaire Russian oligarch $12k/year to pay one of these "trolls" and they produce thousands of comments per day, everywhere!

It's cheap and long-lasting propaganda!

I would argue that an election system in which fraud is easy but obvious for everyone when present is more robust than a system in which fraud is hard but impossible for anyone to see.

Australia does paper voting, and excels at it.

It can be done, safely and efficiently.

Anything involving people can only be done safely if people can be trusted. While in Australia there is such trust in the local people involved, in Brazil that's just not the same story.

So does digital election.

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