Electronic Voting In Brazil
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Electronic voting Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or handle casting and counting ballots including voting time. Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone '' electronic voting machines'' (also ...
was first introduced to Brazil in 1996, with the first tests carried out in the state of Santa Catarina. The primary design goal of the voting machine (Portuguese: ''urna eletrônica'') is extreme simplicity, the model being a public
phone booth A telephone booth, telephone kiosk, telephone call box, telephone box or public call box is a tiny structure furnished with a payphone and designed for a telephone user's convenience; typically the user steps into the booth and closes the booth ...
. The voting machines perform three steps – voter identification, secure voting, and tallying – in a single process, aiming to eliminate fraud based on forged or falsified public documents. Political parties have access to the voting machine's programs before the election for auditing. , Brazil is the only country in the world to conduct its elections entirely through electronic voting.


Development

The first Brazilian
voting machine A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use ''electronic voting machines''. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defi ...
s were developed in 1996 by a Brazilian partnership of three companies Omnitech (previously known as TDA), Microbase and Unisys do Brasil attending the
Superior Electoral Court The Superior Electoral Court (, TSE) is the highest body of the Brazilian Election Justice, Brazilian Electoral Justice, which also comprises one Regional Electoral Court (Brazil), Regional Electoral Court (, TRE) in each of the 26 states and th ...
(TSE) RFP for the Brazilian Elections in 1996. This machine was a modified IBM PC 80386 compatible clone, known as UE96. In 1998, Diebold-Procomp, Microbase and Samurai (formerly known as Omnitech) partnered to produce UE98. In 2000, Microbase and Diebold-Procomp developed the UE2000 together. In 2000, Brazil completed the first completely automated election. The original operating system was
VirtuOS Virtuos Ltd is a video game development company headquartered in Singapore with studios across Asia, Europe, and North America. Virtuos specializes in game development and art production for AAA consoles, PC, and mobile titles – working as an ...
, similar to
DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...
and includes multitasking support, was developed by Microbase. It was used in the 1996, 1998 and 2000 elections. In 2002, Unisys was unable to renew their partnership with Microbase, and were unable to reuse the VirtuOS based code. Microsoft stepped in, and provided licenses for the
Windows CE Windows CE, later known as Windows Embedded CE and Windows Embedded Compact, is a discontinued operating system developed by Microsoft for mobile and embedded devices. It was part of the Windows Embedded family and served as the software foun ...
operating system free of charge. In 2008, under initiative from the TSE Electronic voting team migrated to a
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
(dubbed UEnux) OS to reduce costs and take full control of development cycle. It was incorrectly reported by the press that the UEnux project was carried out by Diebold/Procomp.


Concerns

There still remain some questions about the security of the electronic voting system, but no case of
election fraud Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share o ...
has been uncovered. Critics argue that the voting machines do not produce a receipt for the voter. The application program which verifies the internal integrity of the system is itself vulnerable to modification, but it is possible to print paper receipts that allow anyone to compare how many voters attended and how many votes were entered in the ballot box, called "boletim de urna" (''ballot paper'') and "zerésima" ("''zeroth''"), allowing audit. An inspection by the city of St.º Estevão,
Bahia Bahia () is one of the 26 Federative units of Brazil, states of Brazil, located in the Northeast Region, Brazil, Northeast Region of the country. It is the fourth-largest Brazilian state by population (after São Paulo (state), São Paulo, Mina ...
, described the system of seals and closure of the machine as simple, and allowed easy access to the internal memory slot. However, it is not possible to insert votes into the internal memory without electronic ballot box,
data terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical computer hardware, hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to ...
of the election workers and voters, as well as their fingerprints


Process

On the eve of an election, the election authorities in each State select a number of voting machines by lot (all available voting machines take part in that lot, identified by their serial number), and those machines so selected, instead of being used in actual polling stations, are retained in the seat of the State's Regional Electoral Court for a "parallel voting", conducted for audit purposes in the presence of representatives designated by the political parties. The audit vote takes place on the same date as the election. This parallel voting is a mock election but the votes entered in the voting machine are not secret, instead they are witnessed by all party representatives present at the audit process. The whole audit is filmed, and the representatives of the political parties present for the audit direct publicly that a random quantity of votes are to be inserted in the machine for each candidate. A tally is kept of the instructions received from each party representative. Each party representative orders a number of votes to be inserted at the machine, but he only reveals that number, and the recipients, during the audit. So, the numbers are not previously known, because the only way they could be known by others is if there were a collusion between rival parties. At the end of the process, then, when all the parties have directed that certain number of votes then chosen are to be registered for each candidate in the audit vote, the votes ordered to be inserted by each party representative for each candidate are added up, and the total number of votes of the mock election is known, as well as the total number of votes of each candidate. Once the mock votes end and the profile of the vote is known, the electronic counting of the votes contained in the voting machines used during the audit takes place. The result indicated by the voting machines software has to correspond to the previously known result. As the machines were selected at random by lot, if the result given by the software corresponds to the previously known result resulting from the sum of the parties's public instructions (which has happened in all elections so far), the system is deemed by the election authorities as reliable for receiving, properly registering and accurately tallying the votes. Given that the machines are chosen at random, the reliability of the chosen ones is deemed to represent the reliability of the others. If the audit failed to produce a positive result (the matching of the votes counted to the sum of the instructions), then the whole election in the State in question would be void.


Benefits

Supporters of the electronic vote claim that unless the
fraud In law, fraud is intent (law), intentional deception to deprive a victim of a legal right or to gain from a victim unlawfully or unfairly. Fraud can violate Civil law (common law), civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrato ...
were intentionally designed into the machines, it would be impossible to carry an extensive fraud in such a small amount of time. The Brazilian
Superior Electoral Court The Superior Electoral Court (, TSE) is the highest body of the Brazilian Election Justice, Brazilian Electoral Justice, which also comprises one Regional Electoral Court (Brazil), Regional Electoral Court (, TRE) in each of the 26 states and th ...
(TSE) regularly promotes an event called Public Safety Test (PST). Any citizen over the age of 18 can register to attend. During the event, the participants attend lectures about the election procedure and its security measures. They have access to unsealed voting machines and their source code. In case of success, TSE implements corrections to the system and participants are invited to come back before the following election to try repeating their attacks. As of 2022, all vulnerabilities found have been corrected. The source code to the voting software is closed to the general public, but periodically open for inspection to some entities, universities and to all political parties. However, some advocate that votes should be printed for inspection and recounting.


Biometrics

A new
biometrics Biometrics are body measurements and calculations related to human characteristics and features. Biometric authentication (or realistic authentication) is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used t ...
-based voting machine, with an additional apparatus that does the voter's
fingerprint recognition A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfa ...
before allowing the ballot to be cast, started being used in 2012. TSE is gradually gathering the fingerprints of all registered voters to spread the process, that was used by 22 million voters in the 2014 general election. For the
2020 Brazilian municipal elections Municipal elections took place in Brazil on 15 November 2020 (and 29 November, for cities with more than 200,000 voters where the second polling date was available). Electors chose Mayors, Vice-Mayors and City Councillors of all 5,568 cities o ...
, biometric use was suspended due to the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
, in order to avoid touch points for voters and to reduce lines.


References

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Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
Elections in Brazil