Only a selected few orgs and groups are allowed to audit and in a very controlled environment because they also rely on security through obscurity. The source code is not available to the citizens.
If by any chance I'm wrong and someone can point me a source code repo, please enlighten me.
https://international.tse.jus.br/en/electronic-ballot-box/pr...
Officially, it's because of total horseshit reasons.
They said it was unconstitutional because it would "compromise the secrecy of the vote". It most certainly wouldn't: the paper would be deposited on a sealed ballot box that obscures the voting order, and the voter wouldn't be given a copy.
They also said it was unconstitutional because it couldn't be implemented in a timely manner. I barely have words to express how dumb that is.
https://conjur.com.br/2020-set-16/supremo-confirma-liminar-i...
The discussion is all about politics because these "official" reasons are obviously stupid and don't fly. We're trying to infer the real reasons why they resist the auditable system.
2022 elections exposed the supreme court judges as unabashedly partidarian and more than willing to violate the constitution to favor the left wing candidate Lula. There's also the fact that Lula never won an election back when Brazil used paper ballots, but dominated the country for nearly 20 years after the introduction of the voting machines.
More than enough to start raising some serious doubts about these so called "authorities".
You just need to find the right balance.
In my country we still rely on a paper process - which is very hard to tamper with but also has a bunch of problems - recently we needed to repeat local state elections because of such problems including shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote, ballots being delivered to the wrong locations, and in some cases voters being turned away. Many of these problems go away with digital voting - but then you have other issues.
I don’t think a perfect solution can exist
E.g., a counter can put a bit of pencil lead under a fingernail and mark overvotes on ballots they don't like, thus causing them to be adjudicated or not counted.
Not even a remote access to a demo ballot machine.
Our congress has determined that a paper trail must be implemented but the judges aren't having it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543423
Source code is a red herring too. If there's no reproducible builds that cryptographically establish source-executable correspondence, showing us the source code would prove nothing and only serve to embarrass us. Supply chain attacks could compromise it without any source code vulnerability. What they need to do is publish the signed executables that ran on election day as well as every executable used to construct those artifacts. Our AIs will make short work of the binaries.
In any case, the prevailing theory is that the mesários are partidarian and simply impersonate people who didn't show up to vote in order to boost their candidate's numbers. Very low tech, can be fixed with surveillance: have people from all parties everywhere observing everything. It boggles my mind that this isn't being done already.