Page 139 - 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)

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Electronic Elections: A Balancing Act

In Brazil, the highest electoral authority – the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) –
has picked one model of voting machines to serve all 400 thousand plus precincts in
the country, has procured, deployed and put to use such machines nationwide since
the municipal elections held in 2000. TSE has designed its voting system around the
voting machine model it has picked, which is a type of DRE with one added twist: a
terminal used by precinct officials to check voter identity physically connected, by a
12 ft. cable, to the voting machine itself.
The voter ID number is typed in this terminal, to be checked by a software running
on the voting machine. This ID is checked against a list of registered voters allowed
to vote in that precinct, kept in a file stored alongside the file with the vote tallies, in a
voting machine's storage media. If an entry is found with that ID, and if the entry isn't
marked with “already voted”, the software shows the voter’s name on the terminal's
single-line display and the machine is allowed to receive a vote. Otherwise, an error
message is displayed. Thus, given the current oversight rules and practices, this
choice of design makes vote secrecy an act of faith in software (non-)functionality.
From 2001 on, the political input into Brazil's voting system's design began to
change. In May of that year, from a collusion among top senators gone sour a case of
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electronic voting fraud in Brazil's Senate broke out in mainstream media, causing a
great deal of public outrage. Besides how easy it was for operators to violate the se-
crecy of votes, the scandal also unveiled how fully electronic voting systems can be
resourceful for colluders. Public indignation then pushed the Congress to take up the
matter of revising election law, so that recount mechanisms would be introduced for
general elections.
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A Bill to that effect was introduced , but encountered fierce resistance from the
authorities whose activities would be monitored under its provisions. The Bill's pas-
sage was targeted for disruption by the president of the TSE, in a series of actions that
drew no attention from mainstream media. First he asked the Senate, in his capacity
as the head of the highest electoral authority (appointed by, and from among Supreme
Court Justices), to await for input from his institution. To deliver, he waited until
five days before the constitutional deadline for passing the Bill if it were to have ef-
fect during the next elections, reminding senators of this urgency (meaning, no floor
debate).
Among the proposed amendments he sent to the Senate, on plain paper with no of-
ficial letterhead, one effectively did away with the printed vote function, by providing
for prior selection, on election eve, of the voting machines to be used as sample in
mandatory recount for audit purposes. The senator who sponsored these amendments
and lobbied his peers for approval, under loose rules for matters declared urgent, was
awarded by TSE, two weeks after the Bill was approved with this crippling amend-
13
ment, a 15-month mandate as governor of his state .

11
A case of legislative vote fraud known as the “Senate panel scandal”. [see ref 2].
12
Senators Roberto Requião and Romeu Tuma introduced a Bill mandating that the DREs be
adapted to run VVPAT extension modules, for unencumbered tally audit by manual recount
of a 3% sample of precincts.
13
A court case that had dragged on in TSE for more than two years, over a bid in which senator
Hugo Napoleão had ran for governor of the state of Piauí in 1998. The declared winner had
been governing for more than half the mandate, but the election was impugned, based on a
claim that the winner's campaign finances were not up to snuff.