How is Brazil able to determine who won its election so quickly while the United States, the world’s oldest continuous democracy, has to wait for an extended period of time? Very simply: Brazil counts its vote electronically — introducing a set of trade-offs specific to the country that also comes with some obvious downsides.
There are several reasons Brazil moved to electronic voting in the first place. One, as the National Democratic Institute
explains, was that the previous, paper-ballot voting process was a massive administerial encumbrance. In 1994, for example, counting all of the cast ballots required 170,000 people and took an extended period of time. And that introduced another significant problem.
“[V]ote counting could take weeks,” NDI writes, “and the post-election period was a time of great uncertainty and tension.” That slow process “increased the opportunity for vote counters allied with candidates to manipulate the vote count.”
In other words, a slow vote-counting process was problematic in Brazil specifically because it contributed to extant political tension and made it easier for vote-counters to tweak the results. So a national electronic voting system was implemented, a system that has not been demonstrably tainted by fraud (despite Bolsonaro’s preemptive, Donald Trump-like efforts to suggest that it would be).
Of course, this introduces its own problems. The Washington Post
reported on Sunday that police officials in Brazil were trying to limit access to the polls by Lula supporters.
The Post’s Anthony Faiola and Gabriela Sá Pessoa wrote: “The Federal Highway Police, an organization closely allied with [Bolsonaro], allegedly set up roadblocks to delay voters in the country’s impoverished northeast and other centers of support for Lula, a former president.”
Lula ended up winning in large part because of votes from the region, despite Bolsonaro supporters’ effort. But you see the trade-off: having one day to vote using electronic machines can speed the results. But also creates individual points of obstruction for bad actors.
The Brazilian system also leads to a variant on the “red mirage” phenomenon the United States saw two years ago. Because internet access is better in more-developed regions that tend to vote more heavily for right-wing candidates, those results often come in earlier. Then, as the New York Times
reported, more remote, more left-leaning regions are added to the tally, shifting the results back to the left.
In 2020, a similar thing occurred in several U.S. states, but for different reasons. Since in-person Election Day votes can be counted more quickly (given that they are generally digitized at the moment the vote is cast), the tendency of Republican voters to cast ballots in person meant their votes were added to tallies earlier. Then, as mail ballots (more heavily from Democrats) were added to the mix, the results shifted back to the left. This became one of the central pieces of evidence Trump used to allege fraud: the “suspicious” introduction of ballots for Joe Biden, ballots that demonstrably came from large, Democratic places.
That the United States allows for mail-in voting in most states means the introduction of a slower process than is available in Brazil. Of course, while occasionally frustrating (particularly for candidates eager to know if they were moving to Washington/the state capital), there was traditionally no downside in results not being available that evening. There was little history of political tension erupting as candidates made competing claims of victory, particularly at a federal level. There was no evidence that mail-in ballots led to rampant fraud, though there were
concerns expressed about that happening and safeguards were put into place.
In the wake of 2020, the voting process here is buffeted by a number of competing and often contradictory impulses, particularly among those who believe Trump’s false claims about election integrity.
Even as Trump and his allies call for rapid counting of ballots (implying that counting slowly allows for fraud to occur despite any evidence to that effect), there’s been an accompanying rejection of electronic voting machines. One county in Nevada switched to hand-counting votes out of concern about electronic machines, and it has not gone well. The Associated Press
reported on the effort:
“Two groups of five that The Associated Press observed Wednesday spent about three hours each counting 50 ballots. Mismatched tallies led to recounts, and occasionally more recounts. Several noted how arduous the process was, with one volunteer lamenting: 'I can’t believe it’s two hours to get through 25’ ballots.”
It should go without saying that hand-counting votes is
slower than having computers tally them. But in part because of the lack of familiarity many Americans have with voting machines specifically (much less technology broadly), electronic machines became a focus of often truly
deranged, evidence-free theories of fraud.
The vote-counting process is also slowed by administrative rules in some states. Like Pennsylvania, where ballots
submitted by mail are only opened and processed for being scanned on Election Day itself. That’s a central reason that the results in that state — which proved to be definitive — came days after the 2020 election. In the meantime, as in Brazil decades ago, there was national uncertainty and an effort by Trump to allege fraud. (That our presidential elections are determined by the electoral and not the popular vote means that the outcome is dependent on the slowest link in the chain, so to speak.)
