Brazil had run off elections for President (incumbent president Lula running is expected to win against Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of São Paulo). As has been the case for a few years, Brazil had an all-electronic election. While electronic voting without paper ballots is overall a bad idea, Brazil has done about as good of a job on it as one can expect. At the end of the day, it is still black-box voting where the voters have to trust the Electroal Tribunal to not rig the votes on a large scale, but the system around the black box has been made remarkably transparent, in contrast to the US where not only are the votes counted by a black box, but everything that surrounds that box is also a total mess. I wrote a long post about electronic voting in Brazil last year, when Brazilians had a referendum on banning firearms.
One of the things being discussed in Brazil’s smaller newspapers today is the replacement rate for the electronic voting machines. Apparently, 1720 machines (0.48% of the total) had “technical problems” and had to be replaced on the day of the election and in a small number of precincts the voting was done manually. I hope that the electoral tribunals will provide more details about those “technical problems” but I do admire the fact that those technical problems are being reported so quickly, showing that Brazilian election officials seem to understand that replacement of a machine is a big deal that must be protocoled, recored, counted, announced, and (I hope) explained. That’s remarkably different from the attitude held the Voting Corporation in the US, which seems comfortable replacing machines and software at the last minute without bothering to tell anyone about it.
On the other hand, perhaps as a result of total failure of government policy regarding electronic voting in the US, voting activists in the US have done a remarkable job at exposing the technology. (Joe Hall’s blog is a good way to keep up with all the recent discoveries.) In Brazil, in contrast, even the nerds seem reasonably content with what is happening. There is a strange irony there: if the system is totally screwed up it motivates people to get off their a**es, figure out what is actually going on (by semi-legal means, if necessary) and learn things that nobody would have ever told them. On the other hand, when the government does a good job of showing in clear day light 90% of what is happening, people just don’t ask about the other 10%.
To finish this up, a quote from one of the Brazilian articles about the elections (in my translation):
The Superior Electroral Tribunal also reported that the elections of the President of the Republic have ended in several of the foreign countries: Australia, Malasia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Filipines and Indonesia.
I read Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship a few months ago, which talks about the changing relations beteen states, citizens and territories, and this quote seemed to fit well with the general direction of the book. There is something amusing about Brazilian newspaper reporting about the Brazilian elections happening in foreign countries pretty much as if those countries were just distant provinces of Brazil. There is no discussion of absentee ballots or the weeks it would take to count those votes. The quote seems to suggest that Brazilians who live in Japan vote in pretty much the same way as anyone else: they go to a voting booth (at the closest consulate), vote there and have their votes counted in much the same way as if they voted in Brazil. Voting in Australia, Malasia or Japan becomes remarkable only because it occurs in a different time zone and thus finishes earlier. (Brazilians who want to vote in San Francisco can do so in person at the Brazilian consulate here from 8 am to 5 pm PST, so their votes will come in later than those cast in Brazil.)
8 p.m. update
It has been announced that Lula won by a landslide (61% to Alckmin’s 39%). Such a big margin was expected from polls, so there is little reason to suspect electral fraud, perhaps. Of course, if the elections were rigged, we would never now. But, hey, people like it:
I went voting this morning myself; it was a quick process indeed. The electronic vote is really a nice thing. People trust it and are in fact proud to have one of the world’s most modern election processes. As today, the only vote was for president, all you had to do is type 13 for Lula or 45 for Alkimim, press FIM (end), and it was done. Also there were no papers on the ground in front of the electoral place. – OhMyNews
Lula also praised electronic voting in his acceptance speech:
I am a man convinced of the lesson that Brazilian democracy is giving to the world right now, starting with the quality of the voting and vote counting process in our country. Which countries that are richer and more powerful than Brazil from the economic and technological point of view do not have. For Brazil to do an election that ends at 5 p.m. and in which at 8 p.m. the people know the results from almost all of the national territory shows much technological competency and much competency of Brazil’s inclusive electoral agency. – Agencia Brasil, my translation.
In other words: “Be impressed by the technology and trust us about the numbers. Really, just check out those blinking lights.” Actually, the blinking lights were designed by local subsidiaries of American corporations in this case, but let’s not have this detail spoil the party. (Plus, While Brazilians have to trust American corporations to count their votes, it turns out that American will have to trust one from Venezuela next week, so there is poetic justice after all. Speaking of which: it’s ok when the black box that counts the votes is controled by an avowed Republican, but not when it might be in the hands of someone who thinks Bush is the Devil, right?) Lula’s pride in Brazil’s electronic voting system is particularly amusing given that he used to be its critic 8 years ago when his party lost an electronic election in 1998.