

19 year old hacks the Brazilian elections - vitorarins
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=pt-BR&sl=pt&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.viomundo.com.br%2Fdenuncias%2Fvoto-eletronico-hacker-de-19-anos-revela-no-rio-como-fraudou-eleicao.html

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madmax108
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...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/electronic-voting-
researcher-arrested-over-anonymous-source/)

~~~
luckystarr
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.

~~~
CookWithMe
> 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>

~~~
luckystarr
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.

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eduardordm
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-...](http://pdt.org.br/index.php/noticias/voto-eletronico-hacker-
revela-no-rio-como-fraudou-eleicao)

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

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

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

------
speeder
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)

