That's an odd statement to make. All of the ballots I've ever seen in the US have unique identifiers, which are then tied to the voter who filled out the ballot. How would you even begin to tamper with that at scale?
You would need to know who didn't vote already (basically impossible), then impersonate that person, then hope they don't vote later?
"which are then tied to the voter who filled out the ballot."
This would be the easiest way to temper with things in Brazil. Our voting system must be secretive because of our long history of voting coercion or outright payment for voting. USA has those mail-in ballots with the name of the voter there. If we had that in Brazil, people in impoverish areas would be coerced to use that ballot so that local powerful elites, militia or drug-lords could control their vote.
For clarification, that tie-in doesn't happen before your vote if you're voting in person - you're picking a random ballot from a pile, more or less.
Mail-in ballots are tied to you in advance to prevent duplication.
Nothing is stopping someone from coming to my house and saying they'll hurt me for not voting for someone, but they don't actually have a way to know who I voted for unless they're holding a gun to my head while I'm filling out my ballot.
If you lived in a Brazilian slum or deep into the hinterlands of the Amazon or the Caatinga, a gun to your head would be the mildest coercion tactic if mail-in ballots existed.
You clearly doesn't know how things would go down in poor cities in the interior of the country near ilegal mining and foresting locations, or near really big industrial farms, etc.
People would 100% pay armed enforcers to round everybody up and coerce them to fill the ballots in front of them.
Each of the machines in our electoral process has on average 300 voters assigned to them. We have a grand total of around 160 million voters. Do the math on how many machines would have to be compromised in a really small timeframe to make "large scale tampering" possible.
Other than the fact that the machines are built on software that is not open source (but is still auditable to a degree), the implementation of the machines seems very sound.
That being said, how does having voting machines stop the physical voter intimidation you've mentioned?
In the last elections a rebel local chief of police blocked the road where Lula voters would vote. If some just burn the fucking papers there’s no election already. Don’t underestimate the willingness of Brazilians to fuck up with elections.
Generally, we fill out a paper ballot, which is fed into a machine, which identifies who we voted for and determines if any ballot errors exist (like two different votes for the same elected position). Then, all of the votes are added up by the machine, which is not a network-connected device, which reduces the chance of it getting hacked.
The paper ballots exist as a back-up to the digitally tabulated votes.
This system is slower, but I would never trust a voting system that does not have a paper backup and I would never trust an internet-connected system.
Electronic voting is heavily politicized, with the far right casting doubt on any election they lose and then doing what they can to intimidate people from voting.
So seeing an electronic voting system that goes above and beyond to instill public trust in the process is really impressive since it's effectively politically impossible here, even if we do have electronic voting machines. There's too much vested interest in making sure voting is difficult and opaque enough to cast doubt when it's convenient, even if there's not really any sign of the votes themselves so far being tampered with.
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u/OddDragonfly4485 13h ago
Wait. Do you north american folks vote with a piece of paper?!