Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) [LWN.net]

Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)

Posted Oct 15, 2008 6:55 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Video and photos show Linux booting on the brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org) by drag
Parent article: Video and photos show Linux booting on the Brazilian voting machines (BR-Linux.org)

If your depending on individuals to do hand counts then how do you know that those people are trustworthy? It wouldn't take much orginization at all to get a few dozen people to nullify the results of many many thousands.

The big advantage is that concerned citizens can come in and actually watch the ballots being counted. This is very different from an election official hitting a button and reading the counts off a little strip of paper that the voting machine spits out.

Counting paper ballots is something that people understand intuitively. Nobody can vouch for sure that the voting machine does what it is supposed to be doing - well, maybe under ideal conditions they can, but there are lots of incidents where voting machines are basically left sitting out in somebody's garage overnight before the actual election etc., and of course nobody knows for sure that the correct software was on the machine when it was put in the garage, let alone taken out the morning after.

Having said that, the paper ballot method seems to work very well for us here in Germany, thank you very much. But then again we tend to keep things simple; we don't elect the President and the municipal dog-catcher and everybody in between at the same time.

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