[rmbyrro]

I suppose the goal of your message was to assert the security of the country's voting system.

I think it's naive to think that any digital system is secure. What we try to do is to make hacking not worthwhile by raising the difficulty level.

But when it comes to an entire country, especially the size and regional relevance of Brazil, the stakes are so high that it becomes too attractive to not hack.

I wouldn't be worried about Bolsonaro or Lula hacking it. I'd be worried about the US, China, Russia, Israel, North Korea. They all possess the ability to hack Brazilian elections. From distance, they don't even have to go there. And they all have a history of systematically interfering in other countries' internal matters.

[rodrigodlu]

secure x secure enough x better than before due to sheer scale needed

for instance it's in our constitution that after the identification that someone can vote, the vote MUST be anonymous. even on the paper time. unlike votes by mail where you have identification (we simply can't have here, for instance)

I'm skeptical on many things, but what you said is much harder to happen than just buying votes on poor neighbourhoods or influencing local militias on our second biggest city.

This is less far off from reality specially for legislative positions.

[rbanffy]

> unlike votes by mail where you have identification (we simply can't have here, for instance)

We could, but it'd need two envelopes, one that identifies the voter, and a second, without voter identification, with the vote itself. A first election official would validate that the outer package contains a vote from someone who has a right to vote, and would pass the inner envelope to be opened and the vote counted by another person. With a process that includes randomly selected witnesses, it should be possible.

But, since all voters need to either vote or justify why they didn't/couldn't, the need for such systems is much diminished.

[brabel]

> I'd be worried about the US, China, Russia, Israel, North Korea. They all possess the ability to hack Brazilian elections.

Can you explain how you expect those countries to be able to achieve that, and why the experts in Brazil would be unable to counter those mechanisms?

[rbanffy]

> They all possess the ability to hack Brazilian elections.

It's much easier to attack a democracy through disinfo campaigns and sponsoring coups. It was like that in the ousting of Dilma in 2016 (yesterday yet another court of law ruled she didn't commit an impeachable offense). Far-right ultra-nationalist propaganda has been used - with enormous success, I must add - to destabilize both countries like Brazil up to the whole EU (Brexit, anyone?).

In Brazil we are amidst a scandal that points to the president himself ordered higher highway patrol enforcement specifically in regions where the opposition candidate was expected to win more votes, in an attempt to limit participation in those specific demographics.

> What we try to do is to make hacking not worthwhile by raising the difficulty level.

I worked in the 2002 election (for Unisys, who made a lot of the voting machines) and the machine itself, its software, and all the handling protocols around it are designed to make hacking it a very high-effort/low-return affair. As I mentioned before, there are many ways to push an election they way of a candidate, but, in Brazil at least, none of those pass through the voting system.