tor 2015-10-08 klockan 16:48 -0700 skrev Chuck Guzis: All the votes is still counted by hand. Both att election evening (by election workers) and afterwards (multiple times) in the months after election. The "Valvaka" is the election day TV-program, the computers is included because people wants an early impression of who will be statsminister in one week, it's an statistical exercise. AT election day we have 3 different elections: local municipality (really its "house" which then elects the cabinett including "city major") the same for "l?n" (country council) and state (election elects the country's riksdag - "house") Riksdagen elects statsminister (normally, the situation now is a bit peculiar.) The state administration thru its "l?nsstyrelser" (who is geographical areas corresponding to "l?n/region" (country council) it responsible for counting and tabulating votes (country council election and riksdagen.)

Very convenient for those who run the government that runs the election process. In the state where I live the setup (by law, as I recall) is a nice hybrid. Paper (mark sense) ballots, scanned by machine. But anyone can look at a ballot and see what it says, and you can recount them by hand if necessary. So the security of the counting machines is not actually critical because they aren't the final authority. paul

On 10/09/2015 07:38 AM, Paul Koning wrote: We're mark-sense too, but with a key difference. We have what amounts to a two-week voting period, with returned ballots sent by mail or deposited in special drop-boxes (which, when not used for voting, are used to collect tax payments). No election-day scramble, no trying to find a polling place. I miss the old system of voting in person, but the current one is much more difficult to manipulate and saves money at the same time. --Chuck

Yep. Welcome to the land of the stupid.

Forgive the question, but what is an "election vigil"? Just people paying attention to the tallying at night after voting has closed?

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