The credibility of the electronic voting machines adopted by the Brazilian electoral system was challenged by a Professor of the Computing Institute of the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Jorge Stolfi, in a public hearing about that matter, held on Thursday (12/4), by the Committee on the Constitution and Justice and Citizenship.

According to him, it is a consensus among area experts that the system can allow undetected flaws and frauds because of its nature. In order to make election results safer, the Professor suggested the adoption of the printed-ballot system to complement it.

According to the assessment of Unicamp’s expert, a solely electronic system is “unacceptable”, since it presents “inherent risks that are very serious and uncorrectable. There is a risk that people from inside the system can cause frauds, which cannot be detected before, during or after elections.”

Certification
The author of the requirement for the hearing, Deputy Gerson Peres (PP-PA),
also defended the implementation of a system that would print the ballots to certify them. The printed vote would be automatically deposited into another box, after the elector has confirmed his choice.

“I believe in the fairness of the process, but too many problems are happening, especially in the most distant locations of the countryside, where broken machines cannot be replaced”, observed Gerson Peres.

TSE contests it
The Secretary of Information Technology of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Giuseppe Dutra, also participated in the hearing and affirmed that no deliberated fraud has been confirmed since the implementation of the electronic voting system, which happened 12 years ago.

“There are critics, especially from the losers, who try to find a justification for their defeat, but we can categorically affirm that the fraud in the electoral system in unfeasible, because of the amount of the existing safety devices and of the incredible amount of people who should be enrolled to fraud an electoral result” he affirmed.

Giuseppe Dutra told about the difference between occasional technical problems caused by equipment flaws, and frauds, that would seek to change election results.

Printed ballots
According to Dutra, the adoption of the printed voting is not recommended, since it reintroduces human manipulation into the votes in the process, and increases fraud risks. Moreover, the secretary said that the printers have a higher risk to be damaged during transportation to the voting locations than the electronic voting machine, which would increase the possibility of flaws in the system.

“When the electronic voting machine comes from the producer, it travels thousands of kilometers, and sometimes gets to Indigenous villages, undergoing storms, humidity, dust, jolts”, adds the representative of TSE. “If a printer, which is more susceptible to those impacts, would undergo that, the flaw level would largely increase and would hamper auditing.”

Report - Rodrigo Bittar
Editing - Newton Araújo Jr.
Translation - Positive