Computers in Election Vigils - take two

John Robertson asked: To which Alexandre Souza replied: Ok, I think we need some facts, here. Note that from the very first time I used one of these machines to vote and noted that they typed in my voter ID number using a little keyboard which had a cable going into the voting "cabin" to prep the machine for my vote, my opinion of the whole thing has be very negative. After all, I had only their word that they were not saving my ID along with my vote - there was no hardware limitation against it doing this. And I was not impressed to see a whole PC used where a simple Z80 could have done the job my better. That said, not everything is as bad as the above comments imply. Brazil's government is divided into three parts: executive, legislative and judicial. The first two use public elections to fill their ranks while the third uses appointments. There is a special section within the judicial branch which runs elections for the other two branches. This is a full time section that does nothing but elections, with a federal judge running the national TSE (superior electoral tribunal) which controls the state based TREs (regional electoral tribunals). When TSE decided to switch from paper ballots to voting machines in the mid 1990s, they created a detailed specification and allowed interested manufacturers to bid for the contract. Unisys was the winner for the pilot stage, and several places tried the machines in the next election. It was considered a success and a contract for enough machines for the whole country was awarded to Procomp, the winner of this second round. In the 2000 election for US president, the big deal was the messy recounts of votes in some Florida districts that used very old voting machines with punched cards. These machines had been used for decades with no problems, but the close results of that particular race brought the "hanging chads" to everyone's attention. Over the next few US elections, Diebold machines started to be used and caused a series of problems. Shortly after this, Dielbold bought the brazillian company Procomp and so inherited the contract for maintenance and new machines for TSE. The designs of the voting machines used in the USA and Brazil are unrelated and that the same company is now involved in both is an accident of changing corporate structures. One problem with the TSE/TRE scheme is that any lawsuits involving elections are judged by the very people running them. As you might imagine, they very rarely (if ever) find themselves to be wrong. On the other hand, it is supposed to make it harder for frauds from candidates participating in the elections. Just so this is not completely off topic, I should mention that the second generation of voting machines were based on the Cyrix MediaGX processors, before they were bought by AMD and used in the One Laptop Per Child. So though this was the late 1990s, we are talking about the 386/486 level machine - classic! -- Jecel