847
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
847 points (99.5% liked)
World News
58734 readers
1604 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Ask Historians !askhistorians@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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 way to make it secure is to just use pencil/pen and paper and manually count. I really don't know why people cling to electronic voting.
Works just fine in multiple countries, including here in Australia.
(inb4 Brazil is way bigger than Australia. Yeah, so per capita they have more people to count votes...)
listen though: the voting machines are already secure.
paper can be messed with. they have to be manually counted by people every time. that's why the literal nazis in brazil wanted to revert to paper.
No please you listen
Reliably verifying this is a near impossibility.
Tom Scott lays it out well in these videos:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
They want to revert to paper without any of the procedural steps needed to make it secure. You are absolutely conflating the fact that they want paper voting (so they can cheat) with how proper secure paper voting actually works.
Yes, they need to be manually counted. This works incredibly well where I'm from (Australia), and other countries.
You need the votes to be counted, by hand, in the presence of many people, and with invigilators from all parties/candidates making sure no one is cheating.
We even have preferential voting, which is even more laborious, and yet we still do it.
With such a set up you'd have to have a conspiracy of literally thousands of people in order to affect the vote. And if people are just letting a vote be rigged if it's an open secret, well the only solution to that is mass action and you have far greater societal issues. All election systems rely on people fighting to keep it fair.
Sorry, but voting machines are a band aid that do not make elections secure, and give people a false sense of security, while also allowing bad actors to throw doubt over results (because of aforementioned impossibility of verification).
Like, sorry. I'm glad Lula won, but electronic voting is still shit.
stop being stubborn when the facts point elsewhere.
paper votes is part of their strategy to manipulate elections by stealing ballots and more.
you are literally echoing the nazi narrative for weakening elections.
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.
Skill issue.
(Edit: realising this may be received by non-first-language English speakers, it's a meme. I'm not actually implying people in Brazil don't have skill haha. Just that it's definitely possible to have secure physical ballot elections, and just because it wasn't in Brazil, doesn't mean voting machines are better)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pFD5npXRYi8
Paper is more secure, but only if you pair it with procedural mitigations against bad actors.
For example, one thing we do in Australia is having representatives from all parties invigilate the vote counting to ensure it's correct.
Just because it was worse in Brazil before, isn't an argument for electronic voting.
Compromising a machine is much more likely than creating a conspiracy of hundreds if not thousands of people that would be required to steal a paper and pencil election in Australia.
You're free to point 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, some time before elections proper and also after the elections
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
No it can't, and that's the point.
You have cast ballots always under multiple eyes, and have invigilators from all parties that supervise the vote counting.
To pull off falsification would require a massive conspiracy that would almost 100% be leaked.
Two great videos on the topic:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
In conclusion you're incorrect in my opinion.
Wrong, Brazil is proof of that.
It doesn't matter if it leaks or not or how big the conspiracy is, if it happens it immediately casts doubt on the validity of whole process. Besides, "accidentally" getting rid of one or two votes, or "finding" one extra vote, has a bigger chance of going undetected and, even if caught, can be excused as "oops, my bad!"
Brazil's electoral frauds rarely aimed for presidential votes, they were much more often for state deputies and city councilors, where the difference between the last one getting elected and the first one out is usually very small. In the 1994 elections, the state of Rio de Janeiro had to null the results for state deputy and federal deputy. Fraud was rampant. https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/brasil/ha-30-anos-fraude-eleitoral-no-rio-apressou-projeto-da-urna-eletronica,e9c86b3b8ba6575111c5fed66407caf9qn1fx78n.html
Some notable examples of fraud happening with paper, as per that article:
You said in another comment something about "deeper social issues". Guess what Brazil has in spades?
the machines can also be rigged, and often for the fascists.
Exactly, electronic voting is so dumb and I don't know why people defend it.
It's almost like they're offended and think I'm saying that Lula shouldn't have won, which I'm not saying at all.
Electronic voting is just stupid regardless of whether I agree with the result or not
plus they are all owned by gop aligned people.
In Brazil too?
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.
But it's much less plausible when you have more secure voting systems.
Two great videos by Tom Scott. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
This is easily solved by never having any portion of the vote counting and transport happen alone. And representatives from all parties all invigilate so there's no funny business.
Not to brag, but there's almost never any doubt in our elections, and rarely anyone claiming fraud.
It's not perfect, but sorry, Australian elections are better than any country using electronic voting.
You simply cannot verify electronic voting in the same way you can physical writing, and anyone claiming otherwise is lying or doesn't understand.
No lay voter has any idea of what constituents "secure" in a material sense.
All you have are people insisting "my system is safe, your system is not". And this thread is a perfect illustration.
Hand marked paper ballots are notoriously prone to failure. Nothing about them is materially more secure than a printed ballot. And yet...
It isn't easily solved, as the number of venues and volume of votes leave ample opportunities for shenanigans (or, at least, alleged shenanigans).
The Ohio Recount in 2004 is a classic example.