> publishing unfounded claims about the elections being manipulated

Let me preface everything with a disclaimer that I don't believe the elections were manipulated, and Bolsanaro's attempts to cast doubt on them was nothing but a ploy to keep power. However, they absolutely could have been, and doubting them is, in principle, extremely justifiable. Brazil has fully electronic elections without a paper trail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil), but let's first look at some tangential voting machine news from the US:

The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-...

I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians. - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-m...

Some Voting Machines Still Have Decade-Old Vulnerabilities - https://www.wired.com/story/voting-village-results-hacking-d...

Pretty sorry state for the world's foremost democracy. It seems not trusting voting machines, in general, is amply justified. Now Brazil specifically:

In a blow to e-voting critics, Brazil suspends use of all paper ballots (2018) - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-v...

In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy, Brazil’s Folha De S.Paulo newspaper reported on Thursday. In so doing, the justices suspended a requirement that 5 percent of Brazil’s ballot boxes this year use paper. That requirement, by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, already represented a major weakening of an election reform bill passed in 2015. Wednesday’s decision came three months after a team of computer scientists published a research paper that reported a litany of serious technical flaws in Brazil’s current electronic voting system. The vulnerabilities included the hard-coding of cryptographic keys directly into the software, code libraries that were missing digital signatures verifying that they were authentic, and the ability of people with access to the machines to infect them with malicious code.

So the same court system that recently declared questioning voting machines to be illegal, has before also gutted attempts by legislators to improve security with a paper trail, with the argument it risks ballot secrecy, despite many well-regarded democracies using a paper trail or all-paper voting without issue.

The discreet US campaign to defend Brazil’s election - Amid widespread speculation about a coup attempt, the Biden administration pressured politicians and generals to respect the result - https://www.ft.com/content/07533564-2231-47a6-a7b8-2c7ae330e... (unpaywalled: https://archive.is/e1tBD)

The next day, the state department issued an unusual endorsement of the voting system, saying that “Brazil’s capable and time-tested electoral system and democratic institutions serve as a model for nations in the hemisphere and the world.” “The statement by the US was very important, especially for the military,” one top Brazilian official says. “They get equipment from the US and do training there, so having good relations with the US is very important for the Brazilian military . . . The statement was an antidote against military intervention.” [..] The US also provided some practical help to the election process, helping to overcome supply chain difficulties to obtain components, especially semiconductors, needed to manufacture new machines. The former US ambassador to Brazil, Anthony Harrington, was able to leverage connections inside chipmaker Texas Instruments to, he says, “distinguish semiconductor needs and give priority to the impact on democratic elections”.

The US pressured Brazilian institutions behind the scenes not to doubt the elections. It also built some of the voting machine computer chips. As directed by the US, the military found no problems with the vote (I believe their results were honest, but someone would be very justified in calling them biased):

Brazil's military finds no problems with vote, but sees risks - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-military-find...

A long-awaited report by Brazil's armed forces on the security of the country's electronic voting system did not mention any specific problems with last month's vote, but said there were vulnerabilities in the code that could potentially be exploited.

Returning to the fact that the US supplied the chips, it is known that undetectable hardware backdoors can be introduced: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo...

Brazil tests their voting machines - on election day, some machines are chosen by lottery, gathered in a single place, where all the political parties, including opposition, non-anonymously cast votes, so the machine totals can be verified. Presumably the machines are airgapped throughout. But it would be possible to backdoor the hardware and add a radio receiver, just sensitive enough that a signal can flip a bit to tell the machine to alter the votes. Of course the software side cannot be trusted at all, as a trusting-trust style attack on developer machines could undetectably subvert it, despite the open-source code itself being secure. It's even possible one could encode the entire vote-altering malware into a backdoored memory chip, avoiding the need to infect developer machines.

Such an attack would be extremely difficult, even for a superpower attacker like the US or China. But it is possible, and doubtless worth the effort to control a country of 200 million like Brazil. Unlike if there was a paper trail, it would scale, and be near-undetectable. Especially if you can install a government or judiciary that is unmotivated to detect it, and even willing to jail anyone suggesting it could have taken place. A perfect example of the necessity of strong free speech protections.

A motivated judge could easily claim this post is spreading false information about the election (I say it is insecure, citing globally well-regarded news sites and making only limited, reasonable speculation, they say it is secure) and defending a crime (the streamer's claims of the same), send me to jail, and demand HN censor it, just like they're trying to censor Rumble.