Page 137 - Towards Trustworthy Elections New Directions in Electronic Voting by Ed Gerck (auth.), David Chaum, Markus Jakobsson, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Josh Benaloh, Miroslaw Kutylowski, Ben Adida ( (z-lib.org (1)

be under, given its modern voting system, where most voters seem oblivious to
the lessons from their Old Republic .
5 Collateral Entanglements 8 Electronic Elections: A Balancing Act 129
In secret ballots, that is to say, in ballots requiring a voter's identity not to be associ-
able with his or her vote during casting or tallying, the electoral supervision process
becomes, due to this vote secrecy requirement, sensitive to the physical way in which
each vote is cast. As a consequence, if the electoral process dematerializes the votes,
recording only by digital means partial tallies of votes cast, whatever oversight proc-
ess the system may feature seems to end up ineffective, as if “tied up”.
Tied up in the sense that any oversight measure aimed at detecting or deterring in-
sider malfeasance (that is, malicious acts by electoral operatives in possible collusion
with some candidate) will also serve to protect outside defrauders, that is, voters over-
seeing the process for a candidacy willing to sabotage the oversight process (to call
maliciously into question an election deemed lost) or to subvert it (to insert defraud-
ing mechanisms into the system).
Whereas, symmetrically, any measure to detect or deter sabotage or subversion in
the oversight process will also serve to protect malfeasance by insiders holding privi-
leges to program or operate the system. These entanglements between intended and
collateral effects, observable (as reported below) from Brazil's experience with its
fully electronic voting system, raises the central question for this article: Is this ob-
served pattern of “collateral entanglements” due to inept implementations of security
measures in a particular fully electronic voting system, or due to conflicting voting
system requirements?
Computer scientists who want to seriously study the computerization of elections
shall not allow for ideologies to obfuscate the contours of the problems under focus,
inherent to voting systems, but rather, they shall distinguish ideologies as a source
for them, in so far as ideologies shape the social and political value of elections.
From this perspective, the scientific study of electronic voting systems reached a
milestone in 2000, with a PhD thesis successfully defended at the University of
Pennsylvania [16]. In her thesis, Rebecca Mercuri is believed to have demonstrated

8 In Brazil, where the widespread use of DREs was pioneered from 1996 on, history books –
and Wikipedia – explain how the nation's first period of democratic rule, from 1989 to 1930,
known as "the Old Republic", was plagued by collusion. Election organizers and two main
political groups, led by landed gentries, were involved. Regardless of the real outcome, the
books were cooked at each election so that the two groups would alternate at filling the coun-
try's presidency, while the three pretended, with help from the fourth power – mainstream
media --, to find no wrong through the electoral supervision process. The Old Republic's plot
became known as "política café-com-leite" ('cappuccino' politics), from which voters took
decades to realize detrimental consequences. This, in turn, led to civil unrest and a coup, the
1930 revolution, to reform democratic rule. After two interruptions of democratic rule, (from
1937 to 1945 and from 1964 to 1988), now under the spell of some supposed technological
prowess, most Brazilians seem oblivious to the lessons from their Old Republic. Like their
neighbors from Paraguay, where Brazil's DREs has been borrowed, but unlike their neighbors
from Venezuela, whose later debut with democratic rule was plagued by similar plot, from
1958 to 1998, know as "pacto del Punto Fijo".