Today is the second round of the local elections in Brazil, but apparently is also election day somewhere else, and I’ve seen people repeating the age-old argument of “electronic voting systems aren’t trustworthy”, which ok, that’s their opinion. But then they always link to this Tom Scott video, which is full of bad arguments, lacks information, and is overall infuriating (for me, at least).

So, I’m Brazilian, and we’ve been using voting machines since the 90s in Brazil. Almost every security measure that Tom Scott says in this video that “no one does that”, Brazil has been doing since then, and I’m tired of seeing people from developed countries using their own experience with voting machines as a general rule about how things work down in Brazil in this regard. The Brazilian voting system is, arguably, one of the single most important things in the country because our whole democracy depends on it, so a lot is made to ensure it is reliable and trustworthy, and Tom Scott’s video kinda ignores the Brazilian experience completely.

To counter every stupid thing said in this video, I’ll provide a minute-by-minute commentary about why it’s stupid. I don’t plan to change anyone’s opinion on the voting system their country uses, but I want people to at least be aware that it’s not impossible to proof electronic voting if they are willing to do it right. But again, most people, especially those who work in software development, only talk about the software aspect of the voting, as if anyone can go to the voting machines and upload whatever they want. They don’t know about everything else regarding the voting system, and talk mostly based most of their opinions on the very flawed attempt of electronic voting by the US.

Now, if you refuse to use something because it relies on software, maybe you shouldn’t also be flying, or using a bank, or even GPS, right?

Anyway, this article by BBC explains a bit about how the Brazilian system works, in case you don’t want to suffer through Tom Scott’s horrible arguments and my commentary.

In case you do, here’s my minute-by-minute breakdown:

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1:00 – You shouldn’t be able to take selfies with your vote.
That’s actually an electoral crime in Brazil.

1:20 – The system needs to be trusted.
Everything can be audited, multiple political parties and entities are present in the server room that does the count, multiple political parties and international observers watch the elections for any irregularities. If anything weird is detected, the section with the poll is closed and people start voting with paper ballots. The voting isn’t sent online via internet immediately, but only after everyone in that section has voted and the local result has been printed. Election workers are chosen randomly from the population, can’t be affiliated with any party, and everything regarding the election procedures requires everyone to be present and sign off said procedures.

2:35 – Attacks on physical voting don’t scale well.
Neither electronic voting, since voting stations aren’t connected to each other. Any change in the base software can be detected, since it can be audited multiple times before and after the elections by multiple parties. To change any number of votes in a significant way would require the cooperation of multiple people from various levels inside and outside the government, and the same is true for paper ballots.

3:15 – Proxy voting.
It doesn’t exist in Brazil. If you aren’t present, you can’t vote. It’s worth noting that voting is mandatory, so if you’re not present, you have to justify it in court later. If someone voted in your place as a way to give more votes to any candidate, it can be found this way.

3:50 – Voting machines don’t use open-source software.
Brazil uses Linux and the code is open to audit before and after the elections.

3:57 – The software will be loaded from an easily-compromised USB stick on a computer that’s been sitting unguarded and sometimes just idly and inexplicably connected to the internet for years.
First of all: what? That seems… overly specific. Anyway, in Brazil, the software is not loaded from a USB stick, the computers are very much guarded in secure locations, and definitely not left connected to the internet for years.

4:07 – Those systems will only ever get a full-scale test when an election actually takes place.
I don’t even know what to say, it’s laughable that any democracy wouldn’t do regular tests with their voting systems, which is something that Brazil actually does.

4:35 – Trust the software with checksums and voters don’t know what that means.
Voters also aren’t fully aware of how boxes of paper ballots are transported and how easily or not it can be for them to be swapped. Forging checksums would leave some sort of trail because someone would have to do the forging and make sure everything is marked as secure, and I seriously doubt that it would go unnoticed over the software audits (which are, again, made by multiple parties).

4:55 – Test the voting machines through hacking in the US.
The Brazilian government does the same, but at an official capacity instead of leaving it to unofficial hack-a-thons, and works to develop countermeasures to the points of attack found. And again, this is watched by multiple parties and the implementations are checked afterward.

5:30 – Voting at a machine is the same as whispering your vote to someone who promises to accurately count it.
The same goes for paper ballots, and the people who transport the ballot boxes, and the people who are counting the votes, or the machine that counts the paper ballots. This is a fallacy and a bit of fearmongering.

5:45 – Ways to make sure the votes aren’t compromised in transit:

• Idea 1 is “seal and transport the machines physically to the place where the counting takes place”, but “no one does that”. Brazil does that.
• Idea 2 is “to use a USB stick and do some sort of check against the votes counted, but voters don’t understand the technology”. It’s the same as “how can the voters be sure the box they put their ballot in is the same one arriving at the counting place”? So it’s a sort of an argument made in bad faith.
• Idea 3 is “transmit the votes over the internet, but mand-in-the-middle attacks exist”. Brazil does this (although not over the open internet) but only after the polling station closes and its result has been printed and the voting machine is sealed.

In the end, Brazil uses all the 3 ideas at the same time, which makes it more difficult to mess things around.

6:40 – The central server doing the count has all the same problems with trust and verification, “but only a few people can even see that computer”.
As with the rest, it is auditable before and after the elections. The server itself stays inside a transparent room, and the room around it is full of people from multiple parties and international observers during election day.

7:05 – Volkswagen designed cars to cheat emission tests for years.
The software Volkswagen used in their cars wasn’t open and auditable, as far as I know.

7:20 – User error.
Again, multiple parties can audit everything.

7:35 – You can break trust by leaving a USB stick on the voting machine, taking a photo, and posting online.
To connect anything to the machine, you have to open it, and that can’t be done without multiple people present or without breaking seals.

7:45 – You don’t need to break it, just cast doubt on the result, and it’s more difficult to do that with physical ballots.
We’ve seen that happening with the January 6th attacks in a country that still uses paper ballots, so I’m not convinced it is more difficult.

8:00 – Voting from home on compromised devices with malware.
Brazil’s elections aren’t done online, and that’s exactly why. Conflating electronic voting with online voting is a basic mistake.

8:39 – Finding a single point of failure would cost the same to alter one vote as it would to alter millions.
Again, everything is auditable and checked by multiple people from multiple levels and organizations, so that would only be true if everything was connected online, all the time, at the same time, without any other sort of countermeasures. It would “cost” arguably the same as altering the results on a paper-based election, or require the same level of access to everything.

9:00 – Estonia is the first country in the world to offer internet voting.
Brazil has been using voting machines since the late 90s, which are not online, so as before, conflating electronic voting with internet voting is a basic mistake and a rhetorical fallacy.

9:30 – Problems and points of failure in the Estonian voting system.
Each time a failure is found on the Brazilian system, everything is updated to patch that out. Every system is updated over time too, as old software and hardware would be more prone to attacks.

10:00 – Using blockchain.
That’s a valid argument, and that’s why it isn’t used.

10:37 – You should still vote against an electronic voting system “while you can”.
This is fearmongering, pure and simple.

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As it’s noticeable, he never even once mentions Brazil, one of the largest and most populous countries in the world, which has been using electronic voting since the 90s, with 100% of the elections since 1996 being through voting machines, with multiple countries and entities following the elections and declaring them secure. Most of the security measures he says that “no one does that”, Brazil actually does since the beginning, and has been building expertise and updating the technology as required through recurrent audits and “hacking challenges” where, if any point of failure is found, it is amended, be it in software or hardware. The procedures around the polling stations are also created to avoid manipulation of results and require the presence of multiple people signing stuff off.

Given the lack of mentions about Brazil, my conclusion is that (a) Tom Scott didn’t do his research well enough, or (b) he deliberately didn’t mention Brazil because it would weaken his own personal opinion. Of course, there’s always option (c), where a developing nation isn’t mentioned because, if a developed nation couldn’t solve the basic issues, “of course” a developing one never would.

In any case, I hope it’s clear why I don’t trust him. I’ve seen his name pop up before, but I’ve never watched any of his content, and after this video I decided to keep it that way because the dude can’t be trusted with the information he’s trying to convey. I’ve seen a Brazilian saying they sent an e-mail to Tom Scott talking about the Brazilian system and the response was “I don’t plan to revisit this topic”. It’s very clear that he has his own personal opinion and no research or facts will change that, even if they align with his “theoretical” best practices.

And I certainly don’t trust any person making bold statements on YouTube while ignoring such large and obvious counterarguments or, at least, without researching all the alternatives to the thing he’s publicly opposing.

In case people think the Brazilian electronic voting system isn’t reliable, they are free to prove it to the Brazilian government, which I’m sure would be very happy to take the criticism and improve upon the current system. The trust in our electoral system relies on “push and pull” to make things better, instead of developing a “definitive solution” and never iterating over it ever again.