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In Brazil we have been using electronic voting for decades. See, here we always had issues with corruption, and thats why we had to implement it. The thing is that we always had major issues at the city level elections, because many small groups dominate different regions, and they just controlled the election officials, influenced voters, disappeared with ballot bags, and did all types of crazy stuff. It was pretty common at the eighties exchange votes for gas, dentures or even tubal ligation. For all this reasons, a specific voting registry was created in 1985, and an electronic voting machine was used for the first time in municipal elections in 1995. This solved most issues, and elections started to be a lot easier, there was A LOT of confusion in the past. After it was available in all cities in the country, they started to do national elections. The main idea here is that this is a government endeavour, not a private company. There are so many security layers that I think that only another external government actor would have resources to attack it. These machines have special hardware, the encryption keys are loaded at the election day by the government, the machines are there only for the 8 hours of voting, then came back to a government deposit, they account for every machine, they are audited before and after, they randomly choose the election officials, the machine prints a receipt for the voter and the stats of votes of that machine. Each person has an election location and room/machine, so schools are used. If a machine has problems, they have to on the fly generate new keys for a substitution. In 2024 they used 570.000 machines at the election. When the election day finishes, they place at the door of the room the machine receipts, so any ONG or international organization can verify. After it they take the machine to a central place where they connect to them and trasmit the data, and in one hour we know the president.
During these decades we had presidents from the right and from the left, and all cities and states, so you can say it works just by seeing all this power cycling all the time. I agree with the article in the sense that we need paper confirmation, and that we cannot trust the voter machine, but I think Brazil solved this by making sure to control the machine, and printing receipts and making then available to any public organization. I particularly think that only one thing is missing in this technology, technically speaking, I would like to have a personal key with an ecc key created by me, that would allow me to insert this card when voting, so it would encrypt my vote, store and send to the server, so I could, using my card (even online) check for my voting history, connecting all the endpoints. It is still anonymous, but verifiable by me. More information here:
https://international.tse.jus.br/en/electronic-ballot-box/pr... |
It's bullshit, we don't control anything. Our voting machines are Linux computers that never survived a public auditing, so the government stopped let the public audit them.
If either China or the US decided to seriously invest into corrupting the hardware, it would be a several years long process but would actually cost less than our presidential campaigns. There are probably several ways to corrupt the machines software without anybody noticing (it a Linux PC, full of opaque firmware), that we won't know about because the details aren't public.
Without a paper confirmation that we could audit, nobody can't claim it's working. What would expect the results to be if it was compromised?