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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

This is the 3rd world, things work different in here, this is a 180 million people country with mandatory vote. Before voting machines elections would take almost a month to have their results computed. During all this time the ballots were subject to be stolen, inflated or replaced. This was very common in Brazil up until the late 80's. Stories like this are much more uncommon today.

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In Canada, we do elections by paper ballot. Yet, somehow, preliminary results are available on election election. That's when the winners are known for virtually every riding and therefore the prime minister is known as well. The final, validated results are available seven days later. I believe that Elections Canada is legally obliged to fulfill that seven day deadline: no more, no less.

Mind you, we have a population of 35 million people. But the size of the population doesn't matter: vote counting is an embarrassingly parallel problem.

The only explanation for election results taking a month is corruption, plain and simple. And voting machines will not solve that. Election fraud is a human problem and requires a human solution, not a technological one. If a nation cannot properly administer their own elections, then the people should insist that a third party (e.g. the UN) monitor them.

If you allow people a month to count the votes anything could happen to them. In Sweden we count them in a couple of hours to get a preliminary result and then count them again the next day to get a final result. The Swedish votes do not pass through many hands before being counted and always during the counting there are plenty of eyes watching them.

The exception in Sweden is pre-election day votes which quite easily could quite easily be tampered with if we were more corrupt.

The only reason I can see why counting the votes could take a month is to make it easier to rig the election. There is no technical reason for it.

Yeah, but the stories may be much more uncommon not because it's safer, but because electronic fraud is much easier to conceal then physical fraud.

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