But Brazilian gov says their electronic election system is unhackable... Yeah.
Only a selected few orgs and groups are allowed to audit and in a very controlled environment because they also rely on security through obscurity. The source code is not available to the citizens.
If by any chance I'm wrong and someone can point me a source code repo, please enlighten me.
https://international.tse.jus.br/en/electronic-ballot-box/pr...
It's a shame the technical discussion behind our voting machines has been completely ruined by political discussion. The paper trail bill is an objective improvement over the current system and unfortunately (why?) it has been denied.
Surprisingly there has been little to no partisanship in _this_ HN post's commentary. That's quite refreshing. I suppose you're talking about discussion in Brazil. But you know, a few years ago this thread would have been extremely partisan here in the U.S.
Nothing is unhackable though is it?
You just need to find the right balance.
In my country we still rely on a paper process - which is very hard to tamper with but also has a bunch of problems - recently we needed to repeat local state elections because of such problems including shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote, ballots being delivered to the wrong locations, and in some cases voters being turned away. Many of these problems go away with digital voting - but then you have other issues.
I don’t think a perfect solution can exist
Paper ballots definitely have security problems too, it's just harder to compromise an election with many polling locations if it uses paper.
E.g., a counter can put a bit of pencil lead under a fingernail and mark overvotes on ballots they don't like, thus causing them to be adjudicated or not counted.
Those problems can also be solved with a better organised electoral commission. Here in Australia we sometimes have long lines at polling stations, but I’ve never heard of any of those other issues occurring.
One would think they'd have the balls to put up a billion dollar bounty.
That would require at least access to the ballots, which citizens don't have.
Not even a remote access to a demo ballot machine.
Yeah. The audits are a joke. In the end it amounts to nothing but an idiotic judge-god-king proudly declaring that the machines are UNQUESTIONABLE.
Our congress has determined that a paper trail must be implemented but the judges aren't having it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543423
Source code is a red herring too. If there's no reproducible builds that cryptographically establish source-executable correspondence, showing us the source code would prove nothing and only serve to embarrass us. Supply chain attacks could compromise it without any source code vulnerability. What they need to do is publish the signed executables that ran on election day as well as every executable used to construct those artifacts. Our AIs will make short work of the binaries.
In any case, the prevailing theory is that the mesários are partidarian and simply impersonate people who didn't show up to vote in order to boost their candidate's numbers. Very low tech, can be fixed with surveillance: have people from all parties everywhere observing everything. It boggles my mind that this isn't being done already.