Proposal of an Electronic Auditing System Applied to the Brazilian Electronic Voting Machine

TL;DR

This paper introduces SELA, an open hardware and software electronic auditing system for Brazilian voting machines, enhancing transparency and security with fingerprint and hash algorithms, and compares it to traditional thermal printer methods.

Contribution

The paper presents SELA, a novel open-source electronic auditing system for voting machines, with minimal modifications required and enhanced security features.

Findings

SELA is robust and secure for election auditing.

Comparison shows SELA is more transparent than thermal printers.

Authors recommend pilot testing in upcoming elections.

Abstract

A new system, called SELA -- Auditing Electronic System, has been developed to be applied to the Brazilian Electronic Voting Machine. The SELA was designed to use open hardware and software, making it widely known by society. The security of the auditing process is guaranteed by the application of a Fingerprint Algorithm, a Hash Function. This system is robust and requires minimal modifications to the Electronic Voting Machine. In this paper, SELA is described, and its use during the election process is analyzed. A comparison between SELA and the use of thermal printers as a secondary voting record system is also presented. The authors recommend a pilot implementation of SELA for the 2002 Brazilian Elections.