I am from Brazil. If you saw the news, the current president that just lost elections, been insisting for years, that elections here are untrustworthy.
Reason is simple: electronic voting machines with no logging, paper trail or anything. And the common people doesn't have permission to do penetration tests or read the entire source. All of it is proprietary and secretive with no public testing basically.
For years the now president, when he was still congressman, been trying to make a law where the voting machines will print the vote, and deposit on a box. This way people can count the votes printed not just trust the machine, but the government keep inventing reasons to not allow this, even when a law passed, judiciary struck it down.
Thus today people are protesting, seemly almost half of the country voted for him, the difference was tiny, they are protesting. The winner insists elections were fair, but how you prove it when the machines are proprietary and secret? How you prove it when they have no log of votes, and instead just print the totals? In a country full of corruption, and where the the mafia literally made a party to commemorate a specific person became chief election judge, how you trust nobody bribed the manufacturer or the programmers?
Most American voting machines print a ballot an let the voter review it, but not all. There have been some jurisdictions that have given up on that for reasons that seem bad and vague to me.
I think mandating that voting machines be open source is a good idea to me. Here in the US we have 3rd party auditing companies. Various US State and the Federal Government all have different testing/auditing labs that they have certified they trust. Then each voting machine company has to convince them that it is good to sell to the governments that trust them. The final build that the lab signs off on gets a cryptographic signature and the poll workers are supposed to check that it matches what they are given to run on their machines just before the setup their machines for voting.
Do Brazil have anything similar with auditors or inspectors? Or at least some crypto connecting the vendor to the polling locations?
Reason is simple: electronic voting machines with no logging, paper trail or anything. And the common people doesn't have permission to do penetration tests or read the entire source. All of it is proprietary and secretive with no public testing basically.
For years the now president, when he was still congressman, been trying to make a law where the voting machines will print the vote, and deposit on a box. This way people can count the votes printed not just trust the machine, but the government keep inventing reasons to not allow this, even when a law passed, judiciary struck it down.
Thus today people are protesting, seemly almost half of the country voted for him, the difference was tiny, they are protesting. The winner insists elections were fair, but how you prove it when the machines are proprietary and secret? How you prove it when they have no log of votes, and instead just print the totals? In a country full of corruption, and where the the mafia literally made a party to commemorate a specific person became chief election judge, how you trust nobody bribed the manufacturer or the programmers?