Page 141 - 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

Failures that led to long lines, frustrations and problems, failures ignored both by
mainstream media and by a self-evaluation that the TSE later published about such
"test." Problems that the TSE self-evaluation and mainstream media blamed, as if ob-
vious, on the audit measure itself, not on the conflict of interest in having electoral au-
thorities test a mechanism that legislators had chosen for voters to supervise their
power. This self-evaluation was prepared and presented to Congress, in 2003, by the
TSE president who not only ran this plot, but also, as a congressman in the constitu-
tional assembly of 1988, admittedly smuggled articles into Brazil's Constitution [13].
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Based on this TSE self-evaluation, a senator with unclean record then proposed a
Bill that would amend the VVPAT Law so as to eliminate the VVPAT audit measure.
The last shred of voters' right to recount votes after the computerization of elections
was to be eliminated before it was ever exercised. To replace it, the senator offered
Brazilian voters what he called "digital vote registry." As a justification for his offer,
we learned that:
"The substitution, proposed by the current Bill, of the printed vote by the digital
record of the vote for each office, with the identification of the voting machine
on which the vote was recorded and the possibility of recovering it, perhaps for
future analysis, while protecting the voter's privacy, will without a doubt in-
crease the security and transparency of the elections process, making the print-
ing of a record for the voter to check a dispensable measure."
Just like the crippled version of the VVPAT Bill, this amendment also passed with no
floor debate and with no public hearing [8]. As to the “transparency of the process”,
not a chance: every plea made thus far by election supervisors to access the encrypted
“digital vote registry” has been denied “for security reasons” [14]. Meanwhile, Bra-
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zil's on-again, off-again main supplier of DREs has been acquired by a company
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that has been selling DREs of the same basic design in the U.S., as code leaked from
both reveals [5], [6], [7].

8 Reductionism
Several documents indicating serious security (in the first sense) flaws plaguing Bra-
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zil's voting system were made available to lawmakers, as they considered amending

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Sen. Eduardo Azeredo, who has been indicted in Federal criminal court for allegedly
masterminding the money-laundering and embezzlement scheme that became known as
“Valerioduto” [see ref. 14].
16
Procomp, an IT company formerly owned by Brazil's largest domestic bank, later bought up
by the largest U.S. supplier of DREs in late 2007, Dieblold.
17
Except for a new outfit and no VVPAT extension or dangling voter ID input modules.
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These documents include a manifesto and petition by university professors warning lawmak-
ers and the public of major risks inherent to fully electronic voting systems, which do not
allow audits of the electoral process, asking that debates to legalize them include public hear-
ings; a Technical Reports from the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC) and from Coppetec, a
technology research center from the largest public university in Brazil, the former recom-
mending the use of VVPAT modules in voting machines to allow for unencumbered tally
audits by manual recount of a sample of the precincts; an Expert Report on a DRE from a
Santo Estevão precinct, part the electoral lawsuit case TRE-BA 405/2000. This is a document
produced for lawsuit in which two right-wing parties litigate over the result of Santo
Estêvão's 2000 municipal election.