The elections in Brazil are tomorrow, October 2, 2022.
While the anti-democratic narrative of President Jair Bolsonaro (see this analysis) has attacked the Brazilian electoral system, different political experts interviewed by Pensula 360 have explained that this is a very remote possibility.
Carolina Botelho, a Brazilian politics specialist at the Center for Latin American Studies at Berkeley, with whom we had the privilege of speaking in person on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, says that “it is a way of holding elections that we did not do before. For sure. We must remember that in the past elections could be subject to fraud, but not today.”
The democratic system has incorporated changes since 1994 to ensure that all Brazilians can vote easily and safely. The Brazilian experience since then has been characterized by a rapid transition to universal electronic voting. This technology guarantees that votes on ballots cannot be modified to give preference to one candidate or another.
Tomorrow, 156 million Brazilians are expected to go to the polls to elect a new president, governors and hundreds of members of federal and state legislatures, as well as state deputies for the country's 26 states and the federal district.
There is a lot of popular confidence in Brazil's electoral system.
Electronic voting is considered an innovative technology. “In Brazil, since these ballots were installed thirty years ago, there has been no evidence of fraud,” explains Botelho. She holds a PhD in political science from IESP/UERJ, a master’s degree in sociology and anthropology from UFRJ, and a degree in social sciences from UFRJ.
One of the main characteristics of the Brazilian evolution towards electronic voting has been the important role played by the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) – the institution responsible for managing elections, promoting and implementing electronic voting – and the relatively small role played by civil society and monitoring groups, until recently.
Voting in Brazil is compulsory for anyone between the ages of 18 and 70, and unless you have a good reason for not going to the polls on election day, you must do so. The person's name is put on a list, the list is compared to the person's ID, and then they are given access to the booth where the electric hoist is located.
Voting mills were created to be small and lightweight, so they can be taken anywhere, even to remote locations in the Amazon. And if for some reason