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Lula is declared winner of Brazil's election as Bolsonaro rejects results (apnews.com)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/world@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 1 point 7 hours ago (2 children)

That does not explain at all "how to compromise a significant enough number of machines that never connect to the internet and whose firmware/code is audited by several parties and institutions before being compiled and installed on them", but I'll indulge you

  • Brazilian urns are not "closed source". As I stated in other comments, the source is open, entities can audit it before and after elections and universities have permanent access to the code.
  • The voting machines never connect to the internet. They don't even have a RJ45 slot.
  • The "prove this has not been tampered with" is a possible problem, but given how the installation of the software happens, with human oversight of multiple parties, chances of that happening are reduced.
  • For counting, after a check that everything went ok, the urns are locked and taken back to electoral tribunals, where the removable disks (USB) are read in a separate machine, which are then transmitted to the central processing system. There is a possibility of a "disk swipe" here and I don't know if there are any systems to check against that possibility.
  • There is a possibility of MITM attacks during data transmission, but checking back whether the file was correctly received (checksum) is trivial. His worries are again on "a system no one but a very select few can see". This is not the case for the Brazilian system, all involved systems are audited before, during and after elections, including by political parties. It doesn't fix the "average person won't understand how it works" problem, tho.
  • That Scottish case was funny for the fact that the result was a fucking spreadsheet
  • I fully disagree with him that it's easier to cast doubt on electronic voting than paper voting, see that "pencil lead under the nail" trick for filling blank votes or nullifying otherwise valid votes.
  • Voting from your own device is a stupid idea and thankfully it's not even being considered here

All in all, of the problems Tom raised, only 2 are really valid for Brazil (prove the installed system wasn't tampered with, prove there was no USB disk swipe) and both are dealt with with multi-party oversight, which is the same thing used to protect the validity of paper voting.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Can I take a moment to appreciate you as the only person so far to meaningful engage on this. It's extremely late here so I won't respond now (other than in-short saying things like Stuxnet still make me sceptical about the validity of verifying the software running is actually what you think it is, and no, supervision requirements aren't the same because we don't have to indefinitely supervise our paper ballots, but you absolutely do with voting machines if you plan on using them again).

    I will respond in full over the next day or two, but just wanted to send you thanks for actually making solid, reasoned arguments, unlike others who seem to be pretending like the existence of badly run paper elections somehow proves me wrong, which is very frustrating!

    Night mate

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