- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a vocal critic Donald Trump, was reelected Sunday in a result that provides relief to critics of widening U.S. influence in Latin America.
With 100% of the vote counted, Brazil’s electoral court announced that the soon to be 81-year-old Lula had a lead of nearly 4.4 million votes over opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, giving him 51.8% of the total vote. Bolsonaro quickly refused to concede defeat and asked for the election results to be annulled after an evening of chaos at some polling places that followed a last-minute decision to extend voting by two hours.
Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Lula defeated to take the presidency in 2022.
Lula’s triumph bucks a regional trend of victories for right-of-center presidential candidates allied with Trump. It also means Latin America’s largest economy, with a GDP of $2.6 trillion per year, will likely continue defying Trump’s demands, despite the pressure of increased tariffs.
Electronic voting is such a liability for exactly this reason, it gives bad actors plausible doubt to throw on an election result.
Pen/pencil and paper. Much more secure.
There was a saying in Brazil, up to the 90s, that “elections are won in the counting” - fraud was rampant, especially at municipal/state level and the electronic urns got rid of that.
Paper can only be considered more secure if you have special paper and special printing like money bills, otherwise they can be falsified much more easily.
this was literally the narrative to try and make them less secure by the bolsonaros when they were in power. the brazilian voting machine is actually state of the art and they know it.
the machines can also be rigged, and often for the fascists.
Lost me on that. Pen and paper aren’t at all more secure than Brazilian voting machines.
They are essentially low spec linux computers without ports, internet acess or easy way in. The only thing they do it store results and print them on paper.
Even if one manages to crack open a machine and sneak something inside, there is security to prevent it to pass as genuine
The internal state of the machine is not observable and not auditable. Anything stored in a computer can be falsified and the voter cannot know that it recorded their vote correctly. Unless the printing you are referring to is that it prints a paper ballot for each voter that they can check and then drop in a ballot box, then there is a step in the process that scrutineers can’t have eyes on. Even if the software is open source and the scrutineers got to watch it being compiled and installed on the machines, there are so many unobservables. Computers are literally billions of times more complicated and harder to audit than pencil and paper.
The only electronic voting system I would even begin to entertain trusting is one that basically just fills the ballot out for you to make sure it is legible, and that you can validate the paper ballot. Such a system could then also keep its own count, giving a much quicker unofficial count before the paper ballots are counted, but I don’t really think it’s worth it. It is still an extremely complex machine that it would be easy to hide some sort of surveillance/wireless connection in, and anyone who can inspect the running total counts can also use that to determine how each person that goes through the booth voted.
There is value in the brutal simplicity of pencil and paper, folding your ballot, and putting it in a box. It’s a system anyone can understand and that the human eye can audit.
Which can also be easily falsified
Gotta go back to the old tried and true Butterfly Ballot system. That never fails.
Nothing in the election machinery prevents a candidate from claiming fraud.
Certainly, nothing about pen and paper ballots prevents disreputable agents from stuffing ballot boxes or just refusing to count opposition votes entirely.