Free Software with a Female touch

Shitting on voting machines

The brazilian voting system is already internationally known for being 100% eletronic and insecure, for sure. Since the elections in 1996 they start to implement a system, completly proprietary, to do electronic voting in which we dont’t have, for instance, the right of recounting the votes, because there’s no printed version of our votes. It’ s completly automated! Besides, You cannot even know if you really had participated in an anonymous voting because they type your elector number just before go to the machine and type your vote. It’ s really easy to know who votes to who.

The government in Brazil managed to do it in a way that all the people are really proud of being the country where the voting process is 100% eletronic. Wow! Even knowning that people still die hunger in the poorest regions in Brazil….clap clap clap! Milions of reais spent in an eletronic-proprietary-insecure-antidemocratic systems.

Now they are giving us the favor of improving the idea: they are opening a licitation to buy more voting machines and adapt the old ones (around 400 thousand) with a new feature: fingerprint scanner devices. They would collect the initial fingerprints in the next elections, and then in the voting after that, we’d not need to bring our “titulo de eleitor” (elector ID) to get recognized by the super new system.

In a discussion mailing list in Brazil, one guy questioned how it would be if the system for any reason cannot recognize the person by the fingerprint. Another guy gave a suggestion that I think was just fantastic: in case of not being able to recognize someone, they would ask this person to shit in a super shit identifier machine connected to the system! You know, just as a contingency 😉

I cannot avoid on imagine big lines of people going to the government in order to have their figerprints collected and then passing in a toillet to drop the “contingency”.