Digital Elections

Brazil has the most modern computerized electoral system in the world and is attracting attention from abroad

Electronic voting: results in less than 24 hours

The deadlock caused by the muddled American election system - which left the largest democracy on the planet not knowing who was to be the successor to Bill Clinton for weeks - led the main publications of the American press, such as The New York Times, to advocate in their editorials the adoption on the Brazilian system, completely computerized and the only one in the world practically immune to fraud. Now, the suggestion of American newspaper is on the way to becoming reality.

"We are negotiation with the American government to supply this technology for the next elections already", says Joao Abud Jr., general director of marketing and sales of PROCOMP, the company responsibly for supplying the programs and equipments that served the Brazilian election in 1998 and 2000.

PROCOMP, also negotiating with the governments of Argentina, Ecuador and Colombia, is a company that specialize in bank automation, with a 60% share of this market in Brazil. Its entry into the field of electronic voting goes back to 1998, when the company won the public tender process carried out by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The federal body responsibly for the Brazilian elections, the TSE started the process for computerizing the electoral system in 1992. It carried out the first large-scale electronic election in 1996, when 32.5 million voters, almost 30% of the Brazilian electorate, voted in around 77 electronic voting booths installed in all the capitals and cities with more than 200,000 voters, covering 57 municipalities.

Determinate to take electronic voting to all Brazilian cities, the TSE invested about US$ 170 million in the program, and opened a public tender for the 1998 elections, which ended up electing Fernando Henrique Cardoso to his second mandate as president of the republic, as well as 27 state governors, senators, and federal and state deputies.

As the winning bidder, PROCOMP recovered the 77,000 existing electronic voting machines and manufactured another 284,000 machines, for the use of over 61 million voters (57.60%) in 537 municipalities. The results were known on the day after the election. The success of the operation attracted the interest of Diebold - the American technology company that took over PROCOMP in 1999. Procomp's strong point is the manufacture of equipment and the provision of services for the banking system. The company attends to over 80 financial institutions and has already installed more than 350,000 pieces of equipment in 13,000 branches. But its computerization products and services keep growing consistently. "About one third of our sales, is now reaped from our services for computerizing elections", says director Joao Jr.

The company leapt even further in the elections of 2000, when the TSE commanded the first completely computerized elections in the world. More than 108 million Brazilians cast their votes, using 325,000 electronic voting machines installed in 5,559 municipalities. Only the inhabitants of the Federal District failed to vote - there are no municipal elections - as well as Brazilians who live abroad. In less than 24 hours, the TSE already had 90% of the data processed. And Brazilians knew who would govern them on the day after the elections.

 

MAIN FEATURE: SECURITY

The Brazilian system is practically fraud-proof. " Each electronic voting has a number and a tracer. Should a machine be stolen, the TSE can locate it instantly, anywhere", says Paulo Nakaya, a consultant with the TSE. The hardware, which is manufactured by PROCOMP, contains security devices that prevent the equipment from being tampered with.

"Even if someone were to generate a false bulletin of votes, they would not succeed, because each machine has a specific password and all the date is encoded", he says. This system of cryptography was developed by the CPESC, the Center of Research and Development for the security of Communications, of Brasilia, Federal District, which belongs to the Brazilian Agency of Information.

All the electronic voting machines are programmed to start operating at 8 a.m. on the day of the election. "Before that time, it simply does not come into operation", says Nakaya. In addition, there is no single person who knows of the system: the software was developed by PROCOMP; only CPESC masters the system for the security of the encoded data, and the TSE is responsible for the final work of integrating the system.

The probability of a vote being mislaid, on the other hand, is nil. "There are 325,000 machines. Each of these has six persons working for TSE, chosen at random from the electorate, that is to say, we have 1.9 million people working on the day of the election. It is impossible to try adulterate a vote", says Nakaya.

By Sonia Cunha From Brazil Now Magazine - MAY/JUN 2001