Post by @perdido@role.social.br
To answer the why:
Brasil is a huge country, similar to Canada, but we're a new democracy, and we came from a long period of a business-military dictatorship.
We had tons of complaints about the paper voting mechanism. With some bad actors doing all sorts of stuff in the most further regions.
Things like: injecting fake votes in the ballot, vote coercion, and also the classic vote-counting fraud.
To answer the how:
We were only able to do that because we have public servants that aren't tied to the elected government or any company. So, their mandate is tied to the nation, and not to the elected president/governor/mayor/CEO.
All the building process is meticulously auditable, and anyone can join the tests and check for any potential hazard. Several improvements were made to our voting machine over the years, and it now even includes biometric readers.
There's no Internet connection on the machine, there's no wireless connection. There's no raw data hanging around, everything is encrypted, the machine records who already voted, who received the votes, but it can't tell who voted in whom.
@perdido@role.social.br @renata@cosocial.ca In a way that is not relevant here, I was involved in the security of the 1998 elections. The Superior Electoral Court’s (TSE) primary concern was not the tampering of ballot boxes, but rather attacks on the servers that would display the results during the vote count—specifically, the threat of DoS (denial-of-service) attacks. A major task force was established, which even included Embratel. The voting process and the transmission of data from the ballot boxes were already secure back then—28 years ago.