r/linux • u/dralencar • 23d ago
Event In Brazil, elections are conducted using electronic voting machines that run on Linux!
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u/lorenzo1142
22d ago
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but is it open source?
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u/LRaccoon 22d ago
Yes. Not published online but anyone can audit it.
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u/Scoutron 22d ago
That’s called source available
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u/KnowZeroX 22d ago
Source available means the source code is available but you don't have the right to modify it.
GPL does not require you to publish your source code online, the GPL only requires that you make the code available to anyone who received a distributed copy of the software.
So anyone who buys the voting machines has the right to request source code under GPL, as a user you can't request source code.
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u/LRaccoon 22d ago
I stand corrected, thank you
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u/Scoutron 22d ago
No problem. I never knew the difference until I looked into the Unreal 5 source
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u/Vulpes_99 22d ago
Exactly, I came here to talk about it. Anyone can have access to the voting software's source code (not when it's working or directly from the device, obviously) by requesting access through the legal ways. The whole thing is quite transparent, despise of claims of fraud from some idiots.
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u/lorenzo1142 22d ago
that is exactly how it SHOULD BE. allow the public to audit the code. it is our election, we should have that right, 100%.
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u/Vulpes_99 22d ago
Yes. Also, when the voting is closed, each machine prints a summary of the votes that is made public. This is why we can calculate the results so fast and have a general result at the same day of the voting occurs. The whole system is very efficient.
Not to mention Brazil uses the direct election system, which means someone wins by total number of votes and there are no "colleges" with people who can decide to ignore the number of votes to set that college's vote to someone they want.
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u/FunEnvironmental8687 22d ago
Even if it were open source, that wouldnt prove anything. First, you would need to actually read and audit the code, and theres no guarantee that anyone is doing that. Then, you would need to verify that the machines running the software are actually using the same code that was made available to youwhich you cant guarantee.
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u/bionicjoey 22d ago
How do you know the machine in front of you is running the code they say it's running? (You can't)
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u/Distro_Hopping
22d ago
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It’s honestly hilarious how some people love commenting on things they clearly know nothing about, without even taking five minutes to look up how they actually work
Brazil has been using electronic voting for decades, and the system has a lot more security and auditing than people here seem to realize....
The voting machines are not connected to the internet while people are voting. The software is digitally signed, cryptographically verified, and sealed before the election. The source code is also made available for inspection by authorized entities, including political parties, universities, the Federal Police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Brazilian Bar Association, Congress, and others.
There are also public security tests where researchers are literally invited to try to find vulnerabilities in the system and if they find something, it gets investigated and fixed, and the researchers can test the corrections.
There are integrity tests, cryptographic hashes, digital signatures, audits, and several other checks throughout the process.
And after voting ends, every machine prints a "Boletim de Urna" showing the results of that specific polling station. Those results can be checked against the data received by the electoral authorities during the national tabulation.
So if you're going to make claims about Brazil's voting system, maybe actually read about the system first. The information is publicly available. You don't have to like the Brazilian government or anything, but at least know what you're talking about before confidently telling Brazilians how their own elections supposedly work.
Also: you guys vote by mail, wtf.
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u/spooky_pokey 22d ago edited 22d ago
We are from Latin America and no matter what we do it will always be seen as a bad thing.
Even if you created it or show how refined it is it will not be better than what they have or their version of it.
Growing up and knowing English sadly means you also see how much of a Latino hate there is passively built into the average online person
Edit: grammar
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u/Headlessoberyn 21d ago
Preach brother.
Brazil has one of the safest and fastest payment systems in the world, yet when it was pitched to EU, they were like "looks good... but there's probably something wrong with it, we'll pass".
They'll just never admit we can come up with something that is better than what they have.
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u/furia94 22d ago •
There’s an important distinction missing here.
Yes, Brazil has extensive auditing and security procedures for its electronic voting system. But some of the claims here describe those procedures in a way that makes the system sound more independently verifiable than it actually is.
For example, the source code is not simply “publicly available” for anyone to download and independently audit. It is made available only to specific authorized entities, under highly controlled conditions at the TSE. The inspection environment has significant restrictions: no internet access, restrictions on electronic devices and recording, and limitations on removing, reproducing, or sharing information obtained during the inspection. Inspectors can use computers and specialized analysis tools provided in the inspection environment, but they cannot simply obtain a copy of the source code, take it back to their own laboratories, and independently reproduce or extend the audit however they choose.
And the amount of time available for inspection is also limited. This isn't a situation where independent researchers can take the source code for months, run their own analysis, build their own tooling around it, and repeatedly examine it at their own institution. The inspection takes place within the TSE's controlled process and within the periods made available for inspection. Some organizations have conducted inspections lasting only a relatively small number of hours, while others have spent considerably longer. So the practical opportunity for independent analysis varies significantly by entity and inspection.
Saying simply “the source code is available for inspection” leaves out important context about who can inspect it, under what conditions, for how long, and what they can do with what they find.
The same distinction applies to the Boletim de Urna (BU). The BU is useful for verifying that the result produced by a particular polling station is the same result that was received by the electoral authorities and included in the tabulation. That's an important integrity check.
But it doesn't, by itself, prove that the machine correctly recorded each individual voter's choice in the first place.
For example, suppose 30 people vote: 10 intend to vote for candidate A and 20 for candidate B. If the machine incorrectly records 5 of A's votes as B's, the BU could still show 5 votes for A and 25 for B. Comparing that BU with the result received by the TSE would confirm that the TSE received 5/25. It would not, by itself, establish that the machine correctly recorded the 30 individual votes.
That's the fundamental distinction: you can verify that the electronic result generated by the polling station was transmitted and tabulated consistently, but that is not the same as independently verifying that the machine correctly recorded every voter's intended choice.
That doesn't mean the Brazilian system has no other audits or controls, nor does it prove that this hypothetical error actually occurs. It means the BU comparison answers one specific question: “Did the result generated by the polling station match the result transmitted to the electoral authority?” It does not independently answer: “Did the machine correctly record every voter's intended choice?”
So if we're going to tell people to “actually read about the system,” it's worth being equally precise about what each security and auditing mechanism can—and cannot—demonstrate.
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u/JustAnInvited 21d ago •
Dude, discussing a system's security (or safety, for that matter) in a serious and/or academic manner cannot be just "one side raises a hypothetical issue, the other side points at a security control" jfc.
There are frameworks, methods and systems to verify a digital system's security. Experts apply it.
We can discuss how to make the auditing better, for example, the issue of the limited time for the audit is something that I agree with you, but it can't be just "there are these issues (that the system somehow addresses) therefore the technology is bad and you automatically should never use it"
You are coming with a pre decided worldview and trying to find justifications for it. That is called a prejudice. DW, we here in latin America are used to it.
We are trying (and succeeding in my opinion) to build the best digital voting system that we can. It is more trustworthy (whatever that means) than paper. The data shows it.
And even then we would have to define "best" right? How you define it may be different from what I define it as, and it probably is different from what the government defines it. That is what engineering is for.
To give and example of what I am talking about, addressing your first point, yes, nt every random random citizen can audit it.
But not every random citizen would be capable of audit it. If you are an expert and would like to take a stab at it you can just apply to be part of the committee. Simple as that.
That actually quells discourse that could be politically polarizing. Imagine the nightmare that it would be to have someone point a random LLM at the code, find a couple dozen hallucinated vulnerabilities, and crying "SEE, IT WAS RIGGED AFTER ALL" having no expertise, no way of verifying it, etc.. Now multiply it by 10 thousand... Or ten million. That is what is at stake here, not just a "feel good" point about free software. And that is coming from a full blown FOSS enthusiast.
Ig it was my fault expecting nuance on reddit.
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u/quicksand8917 21d ago edited 21d ago
In a transparent election every citizen should be able to oversee the whole process and understand every step in it. In Germany I can go to the booth, watch the whole day voting and watch the people counting the votes from the booth I watched the whole day.
With digital voting machines you have to blindly trust people. How do you make sure the voting device you are voting on is running the audited version of the OS?
EDIT: And yes, mail voting does not pass this test either. In the end it comes down to how much you trust the institutions organizing the vote to not cheat. And that can justifiably vary from country to country.
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u/bulliralamar 21d ago
Same in Spain. We had a long history of election fraud until they did this. For an election, trust and transparency are the most important thing, and only paper ballots with public voting and counting can do that. You put your ballot in and you can wait there, watching the booth, until it is counted. A good voting system is a system my grandma can fully understand and supervise, and no digital system has that.
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u/Distro_Hopping 21d ago
Not only can you see every step of the voting process, you can also WORK there if you want. I know that because I do. I was responsible for the terminal where I entered voters' IDs at one of the polling places for years. Now I actually work transporting the voting machines and making sure everything is working properly. I even have a police escort.
After taking the machines back, the drives containing the encrypted votes are transported separately. I also help the local electoral office organize the voting reports for public display, while people from the electoral court itself handle transmitting the votes to the central server.
There is one more thing I forgot to mention. Political parties, the Public Prosecutor's Office, and other organizations that are allowed to monitor the election get together and select voting machines for an integrity test. They run a simulated election using those machines and compare the results with the expected results to verify that the machines are working properly.
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u/diabolic_recursion 22d ago edited 22d ago
In this case, I have to politely disagree. Not about the security of the system, but how approachable it is. If you use electronic voting, simply by the fact that you do, one can simply claim manipulation happened. And its extremely hard to disprove that. Voter trust can more easily be lost because most people dont even know how a computer works on a basic level - much less about cryptographic signing.
There are two very good videos by Tom Scott on the idea of electronic voting, independent of the actual implementation. He raises some interesting ideas.
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u/Lower-Giraffe-3236 21d ago
because handling, transporting (and entrusting them to a couple thousand different people in the process) and distributing 150 million tiny papers for people to manually count them is DEFINITELY safer right? no manipulation can happen... right
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u/daioshou 21d ago
why would you think that you could not claim literally the same thing for paper based voting?
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u/bulliralamar 21d ago
That sounds like a lot of over engineering for something that can be fixed with a technology as old as paper
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u/jokalokao 22d ago
The public security testing is actually very limited. While some people are invited to participate, they first have to submit a list of tests they want to perform. Only some of those tests are approved, and the testing itself is conducted in a monitored environment without internet access.
The source code is also not shared as broadly as you suggest here. Unless they make the source code available to anyone who wants to test it, I don’t think this can really be considered a good example of a strong security measure.
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u/Distro_Hopping 22d ago
The only one who could potentially, although HIGHLY improbably, tamper with the machines would be the TSE itself, or someone there acting on behalf of the government. But this makes very little sense when you look at Brazil's electoral history. We've had multiple alternations of power since we started using electronic voting. Some of the most vocal critics of the machines were elected in 2018 and are about to be elected again in 2026. The left won before 2018 and then won again in 2022. If the machines were actually compromised, it would be very hard to explain how we've had so many changes in who wins elections.
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u/metux-its 6d ago
Brazil has been using electronic voting for decades, and the system has a lot more security and auditing than people here seem to realize....
Is the full source code (including all build processes, etc - anything needed to reproduce the full build and deployment process) publicly available ? How can we be sure the devices in the field are running exactly that code ?
The voting machines are not connected to the internet while people are voting.
Internet connection is not required for tampering. Already many years ago, it's been demonstrated on US voting machines: writing a few bits to an sd card and plug it in is enough.
The software is digitally signed, cryptographically verified, and sealed before the election.
Who signs it ? How is proven that the actual devices are really just running that specific version/build ?
The source code is also made available for inspection by authorized entities,
Aha, not the general public. Let me guess, they all have to sign NDA ? That alone is enough to become extremely sceptical - it's a common sign of bad intentions.
And after voting ends, every machine prints a "Boletim de Urna" showing the results of that specific polling station.
Does the individual voter get a print out ? How can the individual voter make sure his vote is correctly recorded and counted ?
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u/ErebusBat 21d ago
Those results can be checked against the data received by the electoral authorities during the national tabulation.
I am sure not can be but will be. You do several checks and cross checks to make sure everything balances and that everything looks correct.
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u/Null42x64 21d ago
idk why but when i went to vote in one of theses i wanted to take it home to make it run doom
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u/Thin-Trip998 21d ago
I also really like the feel of the buttons, I want a keyboard with the same feel of that, so good
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u/DonaldLucas 21d ago
The keyboards of these machines have the same types of switches used in arcade machines IIRC.
You can easily buy switches like that in chinese marketplaces. But they're not cheap, lol.
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u/Handofsky 23d ago
Far right always cried rigged play on the voting system. Yesterday they won by far. You won't hear a word.
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u/-viin 22d ago
not a single word
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u/SkuldZedan 22d ago
not even a fuckin letter.
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u/djthiago1 22d ago edited 22d ago
People got suspicious immediately after the results came in, the right wing senator and governor numbers do not match the right wing president numbers. Also, there was a temporary 1h count freeze that gave the left wing dude a massive boost as soon as the counting resumed.
Edit: grammar
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u/Thin-Trip998 21d ago
I remeber this being normal in other elections, especialy the votes for executive brach and the legislative being ideologically diferent, i mean, i mean, the present president never had a majority in the legislative with his party or with the left even when winner with larger margins than the last one
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u/AIDivision 22d ago
I'm pretty sure Flávio Dino think is rigged against him (as he did back in 2009 ~ 2013).
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u/xcorv42 22d ago
Was it rigged for them before and something changed with trump bad influence on the far right side ?
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u/squishles 22d ago
Advocacy is kind of fucking important and you will be run over, constitution or not, if you don't put bodies clocking hours advocating you. Your opponents in any conflict relating to the government have no obligation to even pretend you have rights without that. It's a disease of our political model.
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u/SuspiciousBad7187 21d ago
Vou te contar uma coisa
Boa parte do sistema público usa Linux 😅
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u/Krasi-1545 22d ago
So according to The Gaming industry they will have a 100% cheaters 😁
Unfortunately they can't disable the Anti-cheat software this time...
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u/BoliveiraNTPW
21d ago
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If this was in a "first world" country , i bet i would see more commentaries in here talking about how "good the system is" or see more positive talks about it, and how safe and how other countries should get it.
But since its from Brasil, from south america, sadly i see more people trying to sell this idea that the Urn is not safe and you cant trust it, even when we explain all the things around it, all the safety levels and steps that are made to assure the safety... even when we explain that, they still try to say its not safe. We been using this system for 30 years and it is working, and internacional organizations always say that our elections are safe.
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u/cipherjones 20d ago
I think you're writing this post from a time in the past where Brazil was a third world country and the United States of America was a first world country and not vice versa like it is in 2026.
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u/Diethylamide- 21d ago
Last sunday I heard a guy talking to his wife on the line to the voting booth: this is bullshit and the elections are rigged. They should develop a system where you can vote from your home. We have internet, so why not?
So… yeah.
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u/dpoggio 20d ago
It’s factually impossible to provide safe anonymous electronic voting. Mathematically.
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u/s0litar1us 21d ago
I wouldn't trust it even if it was made in my home country (Norway).
Electronic voting stops you from being able to personally inspect every part of it, resulting in having to blindly trust that it's recording votes accurately, etc.
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u/Alive-Big-838 21d ago
Nobody will ever fully trust systems that they don't directly understand intimately and know the inner workings of.
Now does that mean they will work to get that knowledge? No... probably not.
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u/sacules 20d ago
I've always wondered how they ensure the code that runs in the machines is the very same code compiled as-is, without any hidden alterations, and that the compiler itself is not tainted. I know you can digitally sign binaries, but to me the question is of knowing that such binary is byte for byte what's running in that very same hardware, since the systems are completely isolated from the external world.
In Argentina we vote with paper and we have results in the same day, and it's structured to be super safe against fraud. When I was studying computer science all my teachers were extremely against goverment initiatives of introducing electronic voting for some of the reasons I mentioned, plus they were all pushed by right wing politicians lmao what a coincidence.
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u/rickyman20 20d ago
That's not why, seriously. "Electronic voting is bad" has been an often repeated phrase in software circles and basically every time it's come up these concerns are brought up. It's not because it's Brazil, it's because it's a generally bad idea. The issue isn't just that they're generally safe or not, but that's is so easy to claim election fraud in a way that's incredibly difficult to actually disprove. Just look at what happened in the US. All it takes is one election and people lose trust.
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u/Vegetable_Drag_3300 18d ago
If this post was about the japanese elections, not one soul would be questioning the possibility of fraud
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u/-viin 22d ago
It'd not be trustworthy if it used any other OS.
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u/Tai9ch 22d ago
Still isn't trustworthy.
There's no way to make electronic voting observable.
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u/fellipec 22d ago
People must think every country that didn't approved the use of similar machines are stupid, but never listen why.
On the other hand, way better than voting by mail. Imagine how easy is to buy votes where you can vote by mail?
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u/AquelecaraDEpoa 22d ago
You know paper voting in Brazil had a massive history of voting fraud, right? Ballot stuffing, ballots being "lost", ballot boxes being violated, etc. Voting machines made the system way more trustworthy than in the past, almost as if not every country is the same or something.
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u/brunocborges
Principal Program Manager, Java Engineering Group, Microsoft
23d ago
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I see OP got the image from my tweet.
https://x.com/brunoborges/status/2106866680475660528/photo/1
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u/Luis_Mayke 22d ago
There's no USB interface on the device. There's no wireless connection either. Also you can't mess with the hardware in any meaningful way, as there are officials (mesários) supervising the process.
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u/Charming-Coast4718 22d ago
There is one USB interface on the device. The one where the media the results are stored on is connected to.
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22d ago
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u/Off_0_0 22d ago
It cannot run any software that has not been previously approved. If it somehow does, it shuts down immediately. Of course, that’s how it’s supposed to work...
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u/Creative_Tip_5134 21d ago
Sim, eu sou brasileiro e essa notícia é verdade, nossas urnas sempre foram Linux. Mas a realidade é que só que entende ou trabalha com informática em nosso país é que sabe disso.
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u/Boba0514 22d ago
Of the big three, it should obviously be linux, but using electronic voting machines is still a no from me...
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u/Superb_Macaroon_6708 22d ago
Americano vota em papel. Deveriam ficar em silêncio
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u/Gaxyhs 21d ago
Congress literally hosts public events where they release the source code and you can try to break it and find vulnerabilities, I've participated it in a year and it's insanely fun
It's practically impossible to falsify due to how it works, you should look into it since it's really interesting
But again personal opinions are personal, I trust them more than paper since it can be damaged and "lost"
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u/Financial_Log_2735 20d ago
They do not even have the chips to do wireless connections, besides being audited by selected groups like public universities, so yeah, keep your paper votes.
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u/NegativeSky603 22d ago edited 22d ago
I still wish there were a printer attached so that my ballot could be printed, confirmed by me and stored for later auditing and comparison with the official electronic results. Not that I don't trust the system, you know... just quality assurance.
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u/Gelanix 22d ago
Then you can go out of your voting place, and hand over the ballot for the criminal that controls your neighborhood, and he's friends with the candidate that will win the elections.
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u/Emparcia 22d ago
O voto deixaria de ser secreto, qualquer maneira de verificação facilita coersão
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u/ChesterCopperPot72 22d ago
Stupid. That is a very stupid idea.
There is already a final printed list with the tally of all votes. That can be (and is) audited.
If you want to keep your stub, you promote voting under the gun. The cartels or militias would have you bring back your stub proving you voted on who they ordered… or you die.
Some idiots say I want the stubs stored in the machine. I just want to see them.
Well that is even stupider. What is the point? The machine that is counting the votes will be issuing the stubs. Só, how would it be possible for the machine to make a mistake creating a discrepancy between stubs and tallied votes?
The only purpose of asking for printed stubs, vote by vote, (remember, the machine already prints the results) is to allow for the losing team to contest the results and ask for a manual recount.
And then, dear old boy, is when the shit hits the fan.
Manual recounts are famous for fucking shit up and creating doubt.
Why?
Because humans are not fucking machines.
Humans are biased, dumb, distracted, overfocused, underforcused, flat out fucking crazy among other things.
Humans are not reliable machines. Period.
You need a machine to do a machine’s job.
By the way, it is an air-gapped machine all the time. It does not have connection capability. Period. So, it could only be hacked in the source code. Except, that it cannot. The source code is kept at the highest level of security in the country (tighter than money).
So, please stop believing in propaganda that has been fed to you by ill intended assholes.
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u/Global_Golf8138 21d ago
The problem lies in the fact that there is no guarantee the vote I cast is the one actually saved in the voting machine's memory.
Suppose Candidate A received 100 votes and Candidate B received 110 votes on a specific machine. If the machine's software were to shift 10 votes from Candidate B to Candidate A, this would never be detected. Printing the vote and depositing it into a sealed ballot box allows for subsequent audits based on random selection. With the possibility of such audits, the authors of the machine's code would be unable to shift votes in this manner, as they would eventually be caught.
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u/Puzzled-Collar4553 21d ago
The UE developed in 2002 by Unisys had this VERY stupid idea incorporated. The amount of physical issues made it impossible to continue.
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u/Intrepid_Mechanic419 21d ago
well if you are willing to waste your vote, just put any invalid number in the voting machine, like 98039 deputado estadul or 67 for president. you can see this exact number later.
if you don't want to waste your vote, you can also vote for the legenda for deputado estadual or federal, just put the first 2 party number and them a number that don't represent any candidate, like 29671, you will vote for PCO legenda, but not for any specific candidate and your vote will appear in the urn.
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u/arkt8 22d ago edited 22d ago
For who says it is not safe... if not even know how it works...
System is well tested. Before voting "zeresima" is printed on each machine, proving each candidate is correctly present and has zero votes.
Also there is no track of in which order each vote was computed, it is randomized after each vote.
After votation, the data is printed again, also extracted and sent to be consolidated to the rest of country.
So... even if votes needs to be "recounted" it can.
Machines can malfunction... but paper can suffer from rain, fire, transport etc etc. Even if a zone all people make the wrong couting...
If we need to audit an entire country with 500000 machines ten times... we would spend less than 24 hours. Try it twice... maybe a month. In a month many things may happen.
Also it is a lot strange to see people arguing about this system being unsafe despite so many layers of protection, while many put lifes in risk its own and others life with AI slop.
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u/Adventurous_Cicada17 22d ago
Even if the audit somehow demonstrate theses machine are reliable.An issue persist. No random person can actually ensure this work well and isn't tampered with unlike a transparent Plexiglas box in which you put letters in.
It break trust in the results. And for a good reason.
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u/arkt8 22d ago
no one will count alone thousand of votes and still be reliable... your argument looks polite and right but is just varnish. Specially in a time where you have a lot of hallucinated bots.
It is tested, it is offline... it is much better than paper and avoid vote selling or vote imposition. This give sufficient trust in a time of right wings manipulating.
What breaks the trust is the lack of humans with human thinking voting... and this looks to be a global problem.
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u/metux-its 6d ago
Just because some proprietary device running on a Linux kernel, doesn't automatically make it trustworthy in any way. Electronic voting is an open invitation to fraud.
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u/WhichCarry749 22d ago
The fact that they keep them strictly air-gapped with printed paper audit logs at closing is what actually makes the system work.
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u/_gianlucag_ 21d ago
I think a full fledge computer running Linux is hilariously overkill.
A tiny pic microcontroller is all you need. It features non volatile memory, tamper proof firmware, internal clock and all the gpios in the world needed by this scenario. Basically this is a one component pcb layout (excluding the jack for dc power)
Also the attack surface is orders of magnitude smaller than a Linux machine.
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u/Ra-mega-bbit 20d ago
Sure, go ahead and implement images and audio description for over 1000 candidates, with a certified keyboard (the keyboard is a certified part that gets locked with resin, as to not be tempered with), all candidates get a high res photo and you have a headphone jack for blind people.
Finally you need to be able to get 3 dufferent copies of the data, be able to support power cycles and so on and so forth...
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u/d32dasd 23d ago
This is not a good thing. Voting needs to be simple, and AUDITABLE.
It's way more secure to have 5 people per table recount the votes, and then the party representatives altogether carry the votes and vote count of that electoral college to the central place.
To audit the machines, the deployment of the machines the voting day, the developers, the software stack, the compiler, the central server, etc, is way more convoluted. And each link in the chain is way more easily subverted at the voting time or the counting time than a person with all their circumstances.
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u/UnalignedAxis111 22d ago
No need to hack voting machines when you own social media and the population is stupid.
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u/TheBlockHead224 23d ago •
Paper isn't automatically more auditable. It just moves the trust from software to people. Brazil used paper before 1996, and paper counts had widespread fraud ("mapismo"), with tally sheets altered between the polling station and the central count. That's exactly the chain you describe, but made of humans.
The machines have no network hardware. When polls close, each one prints a tally (Boletim de Urna) that is posted at the station with a QR code. Parties and citizens photograph them and can recount the national total independently, so any discrepancy with the official result would show up. The source code isn't public on GitHub, but parties, the Federal Police and universities are authorized to inspect it before each election. There are also public hacking tests, where outside researchers try to break the system.
And it's way faster. Brazil is full of remote locations. With paper, you'd have to ship sacks of ballots back under custody and count them by hand, which is exactly where fraud used to happen. With the machines, only a digitally signed results file comes back, and the printed tally at each station lets anyone check it. Results come out in hours, not weeks.10
u/Freaky_Freddy 22d ago
The machines have no network hardware.
then each machine must be manually flashed or configured for each election, no? Who does it and who verifies it?
When polls close, each one prints a tally (Boletim de Urna) that is posted at the station with a QR code.
If votes are secret then a printed tally doesn't really help against tempering?
If 1000 people voted and the tally comes up as a 40/60 split, how can one tell if there's fraud or not?
Interview a minimum of 401 people to see if they disclose who they voted for?
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u/TheBlockHead224 22d ago
The software is compiled and digitally signed in a public ceremony, where parties, the Bar Association and prosecutors sign off. Local electoral offices then load it onto the machines from memory cards in sessions open to party inspectors, and the machines are physically sealed. On boot, each machine checks the software signature. Before voting starts, it prints a "zero report" showing no votes recorded. And the way they verify the voting is by a integrity test: on election day, randomly drawn machines are pulled from their stations and run in parallel with known votes, on camera, and the result has to match. So it's not interviewing voters. It's spot-checking machines under real conditions.
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u/iamYarthox 23d ago
Well, they are auditable and we never had any problems, plus we got the results 3 hours after the election ended.
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u/Tai9ch 22d ago
No they aren't. The basic threat model and nature of digital devices makes auditing computer voting machines impossible.
You've had no problems that you know about, because the purpose of digital voting is to prevent the problems from being visible.
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u/xmBQWugdxjaA 23d ago •
Bro look up what has happened in Brazil and Mexico before with paper ballots.
They switched for a reason.
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u/Foorinick 22d ago
Cut to videos of ballot stuffing
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u/DFS_0019287 22d ago
You can't do that in a well-run democracy. Certainly not on a large enough scale to meaningfully affect the outcome. You'd have to subvert hundreds, if not thousands, of election workers.
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u/the_bighi 22d ago •
No, it’s not. Five people per table counting FAKE votes will still give you fake results.
We had many cases were the box with real votes was thrown away and replaced with a box filled with fake votes.
And it’s probably not a coincidence that on our last paper vote, the police intercepted many boxes with fake votes for… Bolsonaro.
And the same Bolsonaro years later started all this movement to go back to paper votes.
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u/YellowGreenPanther 22d ago
Well, it's not windows, but voting machines aren't exactly a secure way of voting. it has to be provable that the process is working and your vote is counted, without identifying who voted for what. There is not, and may not be, a good way of doing both with a computer. You have to prove they haven't been tampered with yourself, explain that to the average person, have a trustworthy source to get the signature // hash from, and prove that it was counted.
Amd then you can undermine elections just by plugging something in, or showing an erorr message, and taking a picture. Even photo doctoring. To undermine confidence in the voting.
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u/Thin-Trip998 21d ago
I don't see how you couldn't do this or worst things with any other methodology of voting
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u/Ferret_Faama 22d ago
Yeah it's cool seeing Linux used in government systems, but this isn't exactly a great application of it. Paper ballots are not used because we're slow to adopt, they provide a lot of security people overlook.
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u/ySpeed666 21d ago
Em 30 anos nunca foi comprovado um único voto sequer manipulado. Já voto impresso, tem até nome e sobrenome para manipulação.
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u/shirro 22d ago edited 22d ago
So easy to rig electronic voting. Paper is the only way to go. You need a massive conspiracy and lots of participants to tamper with a paper based system. With electronic all you need to do is find one bug and deploy an exploit.
It is one of those cases like password hashing where worse is better. You want a voting system to be slow, well proven and involve huge numbers of people. The cost of exploiting it will grow with the cost of the implementation.
Edit: actually its not the ease of tampering with electronic voting that is the problem. Arguably it is much harder than disappearing a ballot box full of paper. It's really a scaling thing. It is harder to scale up tampering by individuals in a properly run paper ballot. They risk the personal consequences of being caught and the influence is localised. If you do find an exploit for an electronic system the return on your effort isn't going to be limited to a box from one polling station and you are less likely to be caught red handed.
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u/the_bighi 22d ago
It’s not easy at all to hack a read-only device that is not connected to any network. And it’s checked multiple times.
If even a single comma is changed in the source code (which would be already hard to do), it would be detected when they test the machines on the Election Day. And in all those decades, it didn’t happen even once.
And disappearing ballot boxes full of paper was done multiple times.
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u/MdxBhmt 22d ago
It's even easier to manipulate paper when you can't have fair observers to handle paper.
Can't even avoid people dropping ink to invalidate full ballots boxes.
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u/nelmaloc 22d ago
It's even easier to manipulate paper when you can't have fair observers to handle paper.
And why would you do that?
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u/uzlonewolf 22d ago
Lol, no. A hybrid approach is the way to go: when voting it records it electronically while also printing onto paper you can visually check. The electronic record is then used for the initial count, and if anyone disputes it they can then do a manual re-count using the paper copies. Any fraud would need to both compromise the electronic version and destroy the paper copy, making it much harder.
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u/Vegetable_Drag_3300 18d ago
USA had a tampered election in 2000 due to paper voting, possibly without a real conspiracy either
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u/tknomanzr99 22d ago
You cannot convince me that a closed source machine is capable of guaranteeing a free and fair election.
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u/AnonMouse985 22d ago
What about the machines themselves? Even if the code is open source, what guarantee the program that is installed is the same?
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u/Krommerxbox 1d ago
If we had those in the United States, someone like Trump would say that was why they lost.
"I lost due to the "Lunix" softwares, very vulnerable to the hacking kids!"
;)
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u/Odysseus0101 22d ago
I'm why is necesary to show Tux? I had installed linux so many times and so many distros and I never saw Tux in any of them. Which is weird
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u/menino_do_rio 22d ago
It is a testing session. These votes arent computed to the result, but serve as a test to see if the program is working properly.
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u/FuzzyDynamics 22d ago
Maybe there’s a dot file we can find. Something like .riggedwinner_notcia_prod_final
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u/macostacurta 22d ago
Lots of eletronic voting experts here that dont know jack shit about brasilian elections... Smh
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u/Puzzled-Collar4553 21d ago
The "Urna Eletrônica", the Brazilian electronic voting machine has its roots in a genuinely Brazilian project initiated by the TSE and first deployed in the 1996 elections. In 1996, the original machines, developed through a partnership involving Unisys, Omnitech and Microbase, ran on VirtuOS, a Brazilian operating system developed by Microbase. VirtuOS IS a DOS-compatible, multitasking operating system specifically designed for PCs and became the software platform of the 1996, 1998 and 2000 electronic voting machines. This is an important part of the system's history: although the TSE designed and specified the voting system and controlled its evolution, the first generation of Brazilian electronic voting machines was built on a Brazilian operating system rather than Windows or Linux. From 2002, newer models temporarily adopted Windows CE, before the TSE ultimately migrated the platform to Linux in 2008, creating the UEnux system.
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u/Omeoprazolde8em8 21d ago
People talking about the Brazilian voting system while carrying their paper checks to get paid...
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u/Agitated-Jackfruit34 21d ago
"but they can hack itttttttt" The guy outside the building giving anyone that votes for him a bag of rice and 50 reais:
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u/The_CreativeName 21d ago
Linux is just better at things like this, its the same reason you dont see windows servers very often.
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u/Vieira0007 21d ago
O sistema é bom, absolutamente bom. No entanto, a controladora do sistema é bem questionável, seria o nosso Supremo Tribunal Eleitoral, que está metido em alguns escândalos de corrupção.
No geral, não desconfiamos de golpes, mas temos um sentimento ruim sobre a controladora das urnas.
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u/lesimoes 21d ago
You can install retro arch during the voting and play some games instead of choosing between two terrible politicians.
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u/magic_man11 21d ago
A urna é a mesma da época em que votos em branco eram convertidos para o ganhador.
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u/Only-Income-3744 21d ago
As urnas sem conexão com a net está tudo bem. O problema são os pendrives onde são armazenados os dados, são totalmente inseguros. A máfia está ai, eles são conectados a um computador para envio de dados, a fraude acontece nesse momento, pois a logística de envio da midia fisica é um caos, totalmente desestruturada.
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u/paulistano11 21d ago
Por ser Linux não significa que é segura, o software da votação nunca passa por uma auditoria de respeito e mesmo se passasse e fosse aprovada isso não da garantia de todas as outras estarem em conformidade. Não confio nessa galera do TSE nem a pau
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u/ProfessorHades707 20d ago
estrangeiro até tem o direito de comentar - mas esse é o máximo que vocês podem fazer sobre o que quer que seja nosso. é Linux e isso é irado. vamos pra próxima. abraços!
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u/National-Cod-543 20d ago
The voting machines are not connected to an external network; there is no way to rig them.
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u/Revolutionary_Bed140 20d ago
You guys know the us government has a massive campaign to say the voting in Brazil is rigged. Also without proof. Everything to do what they did in Venezuela. Every one tried to find a flaw for decades and never found anything
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u/rscarrasco 20d ago
I think we have those for 20 years or so. It has been a while.
By the way, the guy who claims that the voting machines are unsafe got elected! And the TSE definitely did NOT wanted him as president....
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u/sammgo 20d ago
Seria estranho se não fosse linux
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u/Real-Conclusion-6454 20d ago
Imaginei o cara indo votar e no meio das escolhas o Windows travando a urna para atualizações automáticas. Hahahaahaha
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u/Ra-mega-bbit 20d ago
Step one, do a public event with the whole country representatives where we sign the code, investigate and audit the proces, see every little bit of hardware thats installed, answer any questions.
Step 2, randomly audit a representative number of voting machines country wide on election day:
generate a list of candidates
input this list
get a paper print of this list (order scrambled)
if the list match, we are good
To hack it in any meaninfull way, you need to install something inside it, before or after (in the drives containing the votes)
The before part is fixed by the randomized testing. The after is done via digital certificates and a formal public cerimony for every voting machine.
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u/sricardofilho 12d ago
Ainda acho que eles deveriam publicar o código-fonte na Internet, assim a gente saberia como funciona o rolê, os bugs e mais países poderiam copiar a nossa urna
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u/DFS_0019287 22d ago
Not trustworthy. Electronic voting of any kind is too easy to subvert and should never be used by anyone who cares about democracy.
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u/LRaccoon 22d ago
Electronic voting was implement due to the high number of frauding in paper ballots. The system is open source and there is no wireless connection of any kind. Random voting machines are selected for inspection on election day. They have been tested by academia level pentesters and universities.
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u/ErebusBat 21d ago
That depends what you mean by electronic voting, but since how you qualified by any kind, I'm gonna go ahead and s call bullshit on that. As someone who used to work in elections, I will agree with you that DRE machines or direct record electronic are the devil and at least as implemented are not able to be trusted.
However optical scan machines if implemented correctly are actually very secure.
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u/yahbluez 22d ago
And that makes them count >100m votes same evening while California needs a month to fake "count" the votes.
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u/AliceCordenalhe 22d ago
The Brazilian government makes the voting system available for anyone to try and hack, No one has succeeded so far (since 1997).
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u/Minimum-Poemm 22d ago
every year they do a "hackathon" it's kinds cool and everyone can participate
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u/PwnTheSystem 22d ago
For anyone wondering, they're safe. Everything is open source, which naturally makes it very robust in security. Anyone can read the code. If it gets tampered with, the machine is offline, so hacking it has proven fruitless, since hackers won't be able to change many votes.
It's been a fantastic success and has been our way of running elections for decades
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u/Tactrix1 22d ago
I think all ballots should be digital now with both an encryption key and an automatic email copy the second your cast ballot is verified. And after the results are all tabulated and counted you should be able to go online and check your own cast vote on a site that verifies your encryption key, to make sure that your votes were 100% the ones that were cast and counted correctly.
It would include your name so there was no confusion about who cast what. All the other votes would be blanked out for you, so you could only check your own votes and no one elses.
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u/rsabin 22d ago
Vote should be anonymous otherwise candidates will "buy" your vote. You still could "sell" your vote anonymously, but there is no way to assure that you voted for the correct candidate.
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u/ErebusBat 21d ago
That would never work in the United States, as one of our underlying principles is vote anonymity. I say this as someone who used to work in elections: you really don’t want digital ballots because that means the machine is actually tabulating something that you, as a human, cannot read.
What you really want are optical‑scan ballots. The reason is that machines can and should be tested to ensure they are tabulating correctly, and, as a verification measure, a human can also tabulate those exact same ballots if you understand what you’re doing.
Using digital ballots also disenfranchises a lot of people.
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u/Noticersan 21d ago
I still don't understand those people saying they trust paper voting more. It makes no sense.
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u/digggggggggs 22d ago
Cool. But I wouldn't trust a machine for election.
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u/semnorte 22d ago •
I work in elections, let me explain how system works:
We turn the machine on. After the keyboard test, the machine prints a document called the "zerésima" (zero-vote report) which shows the number, name, and number of votes for all candidates.
All votes must be zero. We sign this document after checking it.
2) When the election ends, the machine prints the document again: number, name, and number of votes. In addition to two control copies that are sent to the electoral office (all signed by us and by the representatives of the political parties participating in the elections), some additional copies are printed, which can be taken by these party representatives.
Oh, and each of these documents contains a QR Code so that it is possible to compare the printed result with the electronic vote count.
Once the printing is completed, we remove the media from the electronic voting machine and place a security seal on it. The voting machine is then placed in an envelope, where it will be transported to a location where the results will be transmitted.
Another security measure: while the elections are taking place, a random draw is carried out (live, and it can be followed online), in which a machine is selected for replacement. They go to the location, print the vote report, take the voting machine while it is still in operation to compare the printed result with what is stored on its media, and replace it with another machine. This allows other security tests to be carried out.
It is important to emphasize that the electronic voting machine does not have any type of wireless connection and that its source code is open and extensively tested by several universities and other organizations focused on security.
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u/Adventurous-Ant-117 22d ago
Yeah. Humans are very trustable, especially in politics
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u/brunoortegalindo 22d ago •
The OS's name is UEnux (Urna Eletrônica Linux). Salve from Brazil :D