TSE (Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court)
E-voting
The program for the Study Visit organized by the World Bank in Brasilia (Brazil) indicated that the delegations of Macedonia, Moldova and Tunisia were supposed to visit the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral – TSE) on the 20th of April.
The Secretary of Information Technology, Guiseppe Janino, presented e-voting system. As the slides are in Portuguese, here is a summary, in English:
· Voting is mandatory in Brazil
· Brazilian voters are 137 million people
· 100% of voters use e-voting
· Almost 430,000 voting bureau receive they e-voting machines, which are portable.
· These bureaus are distributed among 3,000 electoral zones, which, in turn, are under the responsibility of 27 Regional Electoral Courts (one for each State + Federal District)
THE E-VOTING MACHINE – voters choose the
numbers; each candidate has a code number
· The drivers for building an electronic voting machine:
a. Standardization
b. Adherence to the legislation
c. Intuitive interface
d. Low cost
e. Continuity
f. Safety/security
g. Easy logistics
h. Autonomy of energy
· E-voting machine gets turned on at 7am in the election day
· In the presence of officials and political party representatives, a report is printed directly from the e-voting machine indicating zero votes for all candidates
· At 8am the voting starts
· The electoral attendant must
a. Receive the voter ID card;
b. Enter the voter ID card number in a terminal connected to the e-voting machine;
c. Verify, in the terminal display, if the ID card number matches the name of the voter
d. Press “confirm” button to authorize the voter, who then goes to the voting booth
THE TERMINAL
The terminal is connected
to the e-voting machine;
each voting session only starts
when the attendant authorizes it in the terminal
· By the time the voter gets to the voting booth, the session is already open and the machine is ready to get his/her vote;
· After entering the number of the candidate, the machine displays the politicians name and a picture of his/her;
· If the candidate is the one the voter had in mind, he/she confirms the vote; if not, there is a “correct” button, to start over again
· There is also a “blank” button at the machine, once Brazilian legislation allows voters to choose no one.
· At 5pm the election day is over
· The attendants then print the result of that machine and the memory is withdrawn; the result is then transmitted to the Regional Electoral Courts
· In 2010 general elections, the result of the elections was announced a few hours later, same day
· The e-voting machine has 10 different security systems to avoid fraud and invasion