19 year old hacks the Brazilian elections | Hacker News Reader

19 year old hacks the Brazilian elections

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14 pointsvitorarins10 comments

Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are machines that (literally) determine the fate of a nation, and in democracies, it is of utmost importance that they are thoroughly tested and validated by security experts.

In India (one of the largest democracies using EVMs), security researchers are crucified if they point out flaws in EVMs, the most memorable of these events being: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/electronic-votin...

Don't call this things "voting machines", call them what they primarily are: computers.

The word machine implies predictability and being built for one purpose only. Computers are not predictable and are furthermore designed to solve any problem, including committing election fraud.

> The word machine implies predictability [...]. Computers are not predictable [...]

First of all, computers can be mechanical - the first computers have been [0].

Furthermore, computers are predictable. If a CPU would not be predictable, how would you program it? If you write a program, you assume that your computer is predictable and that your instructions will be carried out. (If that assumption is not met, a fault occurred - but this happens in mechanical systems as well) In fact, you can perform computation in lockstep to detect errors.

Of course, it can be practically impossible to exactly predict a network of computers with several layers of software deployed... but that is not the issue here.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_computer

Please don't twist it to make them appear safe for voting purposes. They are not.

With today's computers that have any non-trivial piece of code on them it is for all practical purposes unpredictable that they will carry out the task that they are supposed to do, even if every piece of code is known.

The task at hand it "perform a universal, secret, equal and verifiable vote without any fraud involved". I doubt that this can ever be achieved.

If even a small sub-task of this is violated, I consider that such that it didn't carry out the task.

The difference is that a computer can emulate any machine, and it might not be emulating the one you think it's emulating.

Not to mention that it should be an absolute priority for the software to be open source, and easily verifiable by anyone, which doesn't seem to be the case for many such voting machines. And I think that should literally be a crime. It should be illegal for states or local governments to buy voting machines with proprietary software.

Pure politics. This is a blog post written by a party that didn't win the election. (by Apio Gomes, the portal PDT ) PDT is political party. (That's why I'm flagging it)

The original post: http://pdt.org.br/index.php/noticias/voto-eletronico-hacker-...

I'm not even going into the 'EVMs are evil' discussion, but just pointing that this article is just a bunch of lies.

You should show arguments on why these are lies. Whether they lost the elections does not change a thing.

The quality of google translate is pretty fantastic - the article is very readable in English, despite being written in Portuguese.

Before the election I collected on my Facebook lots of data about election fraud here in Brazil.

One particularly interesting case is that in one city there was the exact same number of null votes, white votes and registered voters that did not vote.

One candidate sued to have a recounting.

Not only he lost the lawsuit, but was ordered to pay a huge fine in punitive damages for "frivolous lawsuit".

Another interesting thing is that some Princeton researchers showed how to write a virus that can miscount votes on machines made by Diebold (that also make the Brazillian machines)

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