There will be no "dimpled chads" or other voting irregularities in this year's election in Brazil.
Brazil's Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (Brazilian Election Supreme Court) will be moving all 430,00 of their voting terminals to the GNU/Linux operating system and the machines will run free and open source software (FOSS). Currently Brazil's election computers run a mix of "Microsoft Windows CE" and "VirtuOS".
You can read about it here.
While I personally prefer the good old-fashioned "paper ballots" system we use here in Canada, if you're going to use computers it's best to use "free software".
Why free software?
It's because with free software you always have access to the source code or "recipe" used to create the software. You also have the freedom to change the software to make it do what you want it to do.
With proprietary software the source code is a corporate trade secret and you never know exactly what it's doing. And changing or altering the software in any way is forbidden.
That opens the door to the kind of electoral fraud we saw in the so-called "election" of George Bush II.
Since the election of Workers' Party candidate Inacio "Lula" da Silva as president in 2003, the Brazilian government has been a world leader in the adoption of free software in government. They see it as a means to both strengthen democracy and develop the national economy.
You can read more about it here.
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