Elections in Brazil, the triumph of the (electronic) ballot boxes

In the fourth most populous democracy in the world, and the first in Latin America, around 120 of the 213 million Brazilians have participated in elections in which they have been able to choose from more than 500,000 candidates (from regional deputies to the president of the republic).

The elections, as is becoming usual, have taken place in a highly polarized environment, which has caused the process to be marred by acts of political violence that have led the Superior Electoral Court to prohibit the transport of weapons and ammunition for three days before, during and after election day.

Misinformation has also had a great presence.

False narratives do not need reality to spread and find allies and that is why they have become omnipresent in any contested electoral campaign.

Although the platforms have reinforced their instruments to combat disinformation, in close collaboration with the Electoral Court, allowing

reduce the number of cases, in this campaign more than 15,000 false user profiles (bots or users with inauthentic behavior) have been reported;

more than 3,000 cases that, through misinformation and data falsification, promoted violent speech or questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process, in addition to more than 1,000 cases of massive distribution of false information on WhatsApp (a technique that was tremendously effective in Bolsonaro's victory in 2018).

This mix of misinformation and polarization threatened to call the outcome into question.

During the months prior to the elections, narratives were being built through the dissemination of messages, images, videos, memes... which have progressively created a series of alerts about the integrity of the process in a part of the population and about the reliability of their results.

The main accusations, prepared for months, revolved around the existence of electoral fraud, especially on the manipulation of electronic voting.

The suspicions had been led by Bolsonaro himself, who summoned all the accredited ambassadors in Brazil to question the voting system.

Days later, his current party, the PL, presented a technical report denouncing security holes,

especially in regard to personnel, but without any specific accusation, which was firmly answered by the Electoral Court.

The voting system, which for many years had been an example to the whole world, thus became an object of suspicion.

The expectations generated have made the electronic ballot box the big winner of the night.

The use of electronic voting is not something exceptional in a democracy.

46 countries, including Switzerland, Canada, Australia, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Japan, South Korea and India, use electronic ballot boxes.

In Brazil, its use was established in 1996. The main reasons were to put an end to numerous frauds, especially vote buying;

avoid human errors and extend the right to vote with full guarantees to territories where it was very difficult to move the ballot boxes and deliver the result.

A voting system with respect to which in all the electoral processes held since then no accusation of fraud has prospered.

The peculiarity of the Brazilian system is the absence of a printed receipt for this vote.

Although it is not something exceptional - there are 16 other countries that use this type of electronic voting machines that record votes electronically without any interaction with ballot papers - the lack of a receipt can pose problems of voter confidence, although there are other mechanisms of guarantee that they do not jeopardize the secrecy of the vote.

Not in vain, during these 25 years there have been some regulatory proposals to introduce this type of certificate, but the attempts were declared unconstitutional by the Brazilian justice, despite having been approved by a large parliamentary majority.

This is a questionable decision, especially when in other countries, such as Germany and India,

it is precisely the absence of these safeguards that has been declared unconstitutional.

The reason is rather practical: the technical problems of the prototypes that generated the ballot and the difficulties that these errors caused when they were tested in the Rio de Janeiro elections, and, above all, the fear of traditional corruption, through the purchase of votes, which Brazil has dragged on for decades, as a result of the absence of the secrecy of suffrage.

After the development of the day on October 2, it is confirmed that the Brazilian electronic ballot box is today one of the safest voting devices in the world.

During the entire electoral process, up to 30 tests are carried out, open to the supervision of political parties and social organizations, and on the eve of the elections, 641 ballot boxes were chosen by lottery from among those installed throughout the country to carry out a double vote. (on paper and in the electronic ballot box) to guarantee, with a representative sample, that the counting system is correct.

Thanks to this procedure and its guarantees, the more than 570,000 ballot boxes distributed throughout the country have made it possible to count more than 600 million votes (each Brazilian voted in five different elections) in less than four hours.

A true triumph of democracy.

Rafael Rubio Núñez

is Professor of Constitutional Law at the Complutense University of Madrid.

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