Joe alerted me to the recent news of an electoral voting “irregularities” in Brazilian state of Alagoas, which at this point seem to be reported in a good number of Brazilian news papers, though in none of the big ones yet. Now, I personally don’t really care what exactly happened, and I just hope that this news doesn’t lead people to the wrong conclusion that voting manipulations with those machines are detectable and that the fact that we haven’t heard about problems in other states means that Alagoas is the only state where results were manupilated.

By far the biggest problem with modern electronic voting systems is that many types of fraud cannot be detected. Let me repeat this: CANNOT BE DETECTED. Assuming that the person who does the fraud has half a brain, you will never know, unless they fess up later. (BTW, this is not the problem with specific bad machines – this true of any machines that do not generate a paper ballot that the voter can see.) However, people seem to not understand this, and quite often I hear the argument that there is probably no electoral fraud since otherwise we would hear about it. But since one can do electoral fraud in such a way that nobody would know, the fact that we know of no cases of electoral fraud doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened on a massive scale. In other words: Was the 2004 election in the US honest? WE DO NOT KNOW. Was the 2006 election in Brazil honest? WE DO NOT KNOW. It’s just one of those things you can never know, much like we would never know if the Governator crumples or folds his toilet paper unless he decides to tell us. (BTW, some people did.)

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every now and then someone really dumb won’t end up screwing with a voting machine in such way as to leave marks and get caught. But let’s not get too excited here. The problem is not dumb people screwing with voting machines and getting caught. The problem is smart people doing so and getting away.