Where are these initial votes coming from? They show Bolsonaro about 7% ahead of Lula. But only 1.5% of the vote is in, so I'm guessing it's from more right-leaning areas so far? (given that the polling has consistently showed Lula about 10% head of Bolsonaro in the last couple of months)
Edit: follow-on question: are the other candidates there pulling more from Bolsonaro or Lula?
Edit2: Looks like both Ciro Gomes and Simone Tebet would draw votes form Lula based on the info on them from Wikipedia. They're drawing about 7% of the vote between the two of them so in a runoff between Bolosonaro and Lula so it seems like most of those votes would go to Lula. Still would be very close.
Small, far away cities, say, in deep Amazon and in northeastern semi-arid, take more time to be counted. Lula electorate is more overwhelming in those areas, as they have more poor people that suffered a lot with current policies in Bolsonaro term, like relatives dying without suplementary oxygen in the pandemic, due to mismanagement.
Yes, but in urban areas, poor people are targeted by evangelical churches, which are all supporting conservative candidates. So it’s really hard to predict if a disadvantaged area will vote left or right.
I would say that candidates pull votes from both. People are very ashamed of voting to one of the greater evils in the first round - in the second round votes should be evenly distributed.
From reading the wikipedia entries on Ciro Gomes and Simone Tebet it seems like they would definitely draw more votes from Lula and that in a runoff those votes would overwhelmingly go to Lula - but I'm not too familiar with Brazilian politics, am I missing something?
Simone is from a centrist party. She tried forming a "third option", but failed to gain traction. I do think that she has a solid position for 2026.
Ciro is from a traditional leftist party, and worked in the Lula government. In the past few weeks he has been resorting to nationalistic and more right-wing talk (pro family values, against identity politics). So the Ciro from the beginning of the election would draw votes from Lula, but not the one in the end. Some trivia: Glenn Greenwald has a close relationship with Ciro.
Independent of the results, I find it truly amazing how fast results are available for the public. Literally every refresh shows hundreds of thousands of new votes already verified and counted.
I initially opened the website in Firefox. But did not grant it location permissions. So nothing showed up. Then I opened it in Chrome and gave it my location permissions. I started seeing stuff on Chrome, but also in Firefox.
So the website has stored my ip+location information.
More likely the site is just unreliable and happened to work on the second try in Firefox. It is completely broken on iOS after denying location permissions.
All votes in country should be counted in the next few hours (last one took about 6hrs and people got angry with the delay). The results that are displayed right now are from voters from other countries where voting is already closed.
Second vote for governor & president. Winner-takes-all for senate seats. For the lower house of parliament the seats are proportionally distributed between the political parties.
Gomes and Tebet drawing votes from Lula doesn't affect the number of votes going to Bolsonaro, right? So whether or not they are on the ballot doesn't affect Bolsonaro's chances of reaching 50%+1 in the first round.
A few points of interest for those who aren't familiar w/ brazilian politics:
- as the link shows, brazilian political parties are numerous, so general elections typically have multiple candidates. There's no electoral college.
- voting is mandatory in Brazil. In the 2018 presidential elections, there were ~117M voters. By comparison, the last US presidential election saw turnout of 158M voters.
- Brazil has used electronic voting since 1996. General public sentiment towards it has historically always been positive. No instance of fraud has ever been surfaced and the system produces results extremely quickly (as in, within the same day).
- Recently the president has been questioning its security, but for some context on his political platform, he also held a similar stance to Trump on the topic of Covid and has been criticized over his position saying deforestation is good for economy. He's still the favorite candidate. The second most popular candidate (Lula) has a long history of controversy (one of the most high profile being him being implicated in investigations related to the impeachment of the previous president Dilma). As you can imagine, many brazilians are cynical about the country's political system. Take that as you will.
Other people already explained the base case, but also: for voters who are out of the town were they originally enlisted, it just a matter of going to any poll station and filling a justify form. It is usually quicker than voting but, as the voter can not do it at the enlisted town, it is not an alternative.
Voting is also highly distributed, on most towns no voter has to travel more than 1 or 2 km to get to their assigned polling station (if they enlisted to the station nearest to their homes, of course). Every voting zone is split in a number of "voting sections", every one with a single voting machine, and the number of section/machines per zone is mostly proportional to the number of voters, so queues are not that common; unless people group in some particularly unfortunate times ... local jokes say to NEVER vote at the opening hours, or you will be stuck on a line of senior citizens (who also have the right of jumping the queue, defined by law).
Also, everything is defined with months of advance, so there are no surprises on where to vote.
There is a lot of safeguards to prevent fraud (we had a lot of time to learn this by the hard way) but the bad part is these also prevent some nice things (quickly moving your enlistment to another town/zone/section, mail voting, etc... even transit voting is very limited because you will need to know where you will be long before the poll).
If you miss a few elections, you get put into a blacklist and can't get a passport, work for the government and a few other things.
However, the fine for missing an election is ridiculous. It's something like 1 dollar. If you don't want to vote, you can stay at home and then pay this fine, but there is a caveat: 100% of this fine's value goes to Fundo Eleitoral, which is a fund managed by the parties and meant to be used for their publicity. In other words: you put money in an instrument that's probably corrupt.
If you don't pay the fine you can't apply for public jobs, if already a government employee you can't receive a salary, can't issue a passport, and other restrictions. Nowadays you can justify the absence using a cellphone.
You just have to file a note explaining that you could not vote -- we call it "justifying the (non-) vote" / "justificar o voto". As of the current election, the it can be done on a mobile app.
The only people so worried about voting machines and voting fraud are frauds themselves who wouldn't win without disenfranchising a large swath of voters.
The CCC (Chaos Computer Club, which are one of the largest hacker collectives in Germany) area also sceptical about electronic voting machines and have been campaigning against them for roughly 20 years. Id definitely not call the CCC "frauds".
Since 2009, electronic voting machines are illegal in Germany. The argument of our constitutional court is that every single voter needs to be able to understand how our voting system works without being an expert.
> The argument of our constitutional court is that every single voter needs to be able to understand how our voting system works without being an expert.
It doesn't take an expert to understand that you click on a machine, it prints a receipt which you can verify has the correct thing written on it, and you put that receipt in a box. When counting, the paper receipts can be counted, or used as a statistical check if machines report numbers directly. There's nothing complicated in that.
There was rampant fraud and miscounting during the counting of votes prior to the electronic machines in Brazil.
The people might have understood how their vote worked (they put a cross next to an executive candidate, and write the number or name of the candidates for the legislative) but that's nowhere near understanding how the whole system works.
The people who used to benefit from the paper ballots (the fraudsters) are the ones claiming for its return.
I suspect that's what that statement was about, given that this HN article is about the Brazilian elections.
As a side question, if I may ask: In Germany every person is allowed to be an observer of the count and watch how votes are counted and tallied. Was this not possible in Brazil beforehand?
Or more to the point: What made it possible to defraud the count of votes?
Yes, it was possible to observe, and many people did. In fact, it drew a lot of interest and there were usually many observers per ballot... in big population centers.
But it is also incredibly hard to make sure every counted vote gets observed in a country of 150 million voters and where the polling location are as different as a boat in a minor river in the Amazon serving a semi-isolated tribe that barely speak the country's official language and a consulate in Ramallah. Ballots have to be transported, counted and recounted over a period of days.
If somewhere along the third day of counting someone exchanges 50 votes from a ballot and you saw it, what do you do? Your word against his? What if he threatens you with violence? Etc.
Electronic elections, even though they are a bit of a black box, solved all those very real, very practical problems.
Agreed. Show up at the polls in person with government issued ID that has your picture and indicates if you are a Citizen and your address. That ID is then matched to an online database. No more of this mail in vote. Not one Citizen should have to worry about the accuracy of the vote.
You are mostly correct, but a bit misinformed in two topics. One, the favourite in all the credible polls is Lula. Second, the impeachment of Dilma was due to irregular monetary policy, while Lula was investigated for unrelated corruption charges. And please do not forget to mention that Lula's guilty verdict was invalidated on the basis that the judge was himself corrupt- so now Lula is presumed innocent.
>was invalidated on the basis that the judge was himself corrupt
No, firstly the legal system changed and the veredicts given were considered insufficient for conviction. Then, they were annulled based on being outside the court's jurisdiction.
> Did anyone notice the English translation of Lula's name is Squid? Honestly?!
Fun fact: this name was originally a nickname only. Several election cycles after he became known as "Lula" there was a new law requiring candidates to appear on the ballots by their legal name. So he added the nickname to his real name. And a few elections later the law was repealed, but the name remain.
I still miss this law ... too many candidates showing up with crazy made up stuff in their ballot names.
Before the whole debate of electronic vote being safe or not, please considere the following:
Not all countries work the same, what you perceive as corruption in the US is nowhere near of the reality of corruption in southamerica, a place where corruption is not only a word or a definition but it's literally the force that move things, corruption is pretty much already part of the culture.
So please, don't put your own experiences from the US/1st world countries in practice here, trying to explain how things work in 3rd world countries when you are not fully aware of the level of corruption in brazil. If brazilians themselves are talking about the huge window oportunity for corruption is because they know their culture, they know their problems and they know exactly how things work in their very own coutry.
The last poll came out just yesterday[0]. It pointed out to Lula being way ahead of Bolsonaro (50% vs 36% for Lula), but so far it seems that Bolsonaro has a chance of finishing ahead of Lula (46% vs 44% for Bolsonaro so far).
It's the same as in the 2018 elections. I'm neutral in this election, but on this specific topic of election polls, I agree with the conspiracy theorists that something is really off about them.
Even Tom Scott's video about electronic voting shows in Brazil with a warning saying that "electronic voting is safe" (the same type of warning that shows up for conspiracy theories).
We had no problems with those machines since 1996. My take is that he does that to mobilize his support base.
One curious thing is that the centralized voting counting is done with an Oracle system. Some politicians questioned the contracts value, and why AWS or Google cloud weren't considered - authorities argued that only Oracle supported Oracle's cloud : )
13 elections in one of the largest countries in the world and not a single issue has surfaced. Probability says issues have happened but the fact that none have surfaced suggests they're negligible.
It's also nice to note that there have been already security audits on the current system, TPS (The public security test for TSE the Superior Electoral Court) happens every year addressing the security of e-voting in Brazil, for example, on TPS 2017, people managed to find arbitrary code execution in the Urna Eletronica (That's how we call the e-voting system here)
Each party has delegates present during vote counting, in state and city level. That only became an issue recently. That said, I do believe that the system would be better if physical counting could be performed as well, to increase public trust and to avoid the same situation in 82 fraud against Brizola.
You have the total of votes per machine. In looking at these locations local candidates have a good notion on how well their party is going to perform. Things that call their attention are the "bumps" like the one by the end of last US election. When that happens, they can signal the voting machine to be isolated and call in an electoral judge.
Sounds easy to evade. Once a machine has recorded 10+ votes since the last time it outputted a count, it could start giving a small probabilistic advantage to a preferred candidate, at the expense of other candidates. There would be no bumps, and the results would never differ by more than, say, relative 20% from the real count. E.g. if preferred candidate got 10% on one voting machine, it would give him 12%, taking the other 2% from all other candidates.
No bumps or disproportionate popularity in traditionally unpopular regions to raise suspicion.
You're suggesting large scale compromise of millions of voting machines. These machines are heavily guarded and secure. They are audited by members of parties and the civil society. I'm not saying such a thing is impossible but it more or less is.
Or the compromise (or cooperation) of a few of the software supply chain components used to program the chipset of the voting machines. Or the development machines used to write and upload the voting software. Or the foundry used to cast the chips. You think if e.g. China devoted ~5 years of their best hacking group's time to this, they couldn't do it? Because that's a very low price to pay to sway the election of a country such as Brazil.
> They are audited by members of parties and the civil society.
Audited how? Do they plug in a USB, download the software, and verify that it matches the (hopefully open-source, ideally formally verified) code it's supposed to be running?
Let's say it matches - how can they trust that the code the USB port emitted, is what is actually running?
they seize random voting machines from polling sessions and input a known amount of votes for each candidate and match them with the ending totals. (just one kind of audit they do)
VW was able to detect when an emissions test was being done, so there may be ways to detect this as well. E.g. by the unusually fast rate at which votes are being cast, or if this "seizure" involves moving the machine, reconnecting power to it, or any other kind of abnormal interaction.
Why make things so complicated when manual counting works perfectly well??
With auditing being so difficult, you're not even saving any labor.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about.
Manual counting does not work well. I cannot stress this enough.
Manual counting in the past has meant much work, rework, terror, confusion and rampant fraud and miscounting. Brazil is a gigantic country with over 150 million electors spread across an area larger than western Europe and with a population much more diverse than that.
The labour and the complexity involved in producing the machines and auditing is nothing compared to what manual counting was.
Can you be more specific? I know that population or geographic size alone has no effect on counting complexity - the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted. Communicating the vote totals from electoral districts can be done through the same medium as the voting machines would use, and producing final sums takes only O(log n) parallel steps.
So where does the terror, confusion, and rampant fraud come from, and what is it about Brazil that causes them, when so many other countries manage to avoid them?
> the number of people counting is proportional to the number of votes to be counted
Each new person is a new liability. Complexity and likelihood of mistakes do grow with number of votes.
People tick ambiguous boxes for executive functions (somehwere between 2 candidates). How do you count that?
People write numbers or names of legislative candidates. Sometimes it's illegible. Sometimes more than one candidate share the same first name or surname and the voter only wrote one. How do you count that?
The people counting the votes are members of the civil society. They're working for free in horrible conditions (hot and humid, hard chairs, pressure to finish and go back home). They're tired. They're hungry. They're thirsty. They've been many hours speaking only with a bunch of other people whom they've only met in the day and some of them are fervorously against their ideology. They make mistakes. A lot of times they miscount on purpose.
In certain regions, the "colonel" (like a local caudillo, usually a big farmer with a lot of properties and the entire town dependent on him) will not let people leave the counting place until his candidate has an acceptable count.
People leave boxes blank. The person counting ticks their favourite candidate and scores a new vote.
Fiscals from parties question decisions about all the above. Sometimes there's need to recount. The problems above compound.
Criteria for counting ambiguous votes may change during the course of the counting. Do you recount everything? Do you just pretend it's ok to change criteria depending on what results you have this far?
It also makes everything messier and take much longer. There's a reason we move away from paper-based ledgers. Those reasons also apply here but at much larger scale.
This is just a glimpse of the problems. They're much larger and deeper than I could convey in a forum post.
Of all the problems you listed, only the "colonel" is ~unique to Brazil. Every single one of the others is something a country of any size has also faced, and solved, without introducing black boxes into the system.
Well, since I took the time to answer your previous question with many examples of issues and you seem to think they have been solved, why don't you go through my list and explain how you would solve each of them, or how you have seen them solved?
That would be helpful, and would be the polite thing to do. Simply saying they have isn't.
Also please note the last paragraph on my post. It's an important one.
Also remember, the black box is heavily audited and signed off by all interested parties. There's plenty of space for improvement, but it's not only good enough but it's also much better than what I observe everywhere else and our own past.
I believe they also have a button to spit out current vote count for each candidate, obviously still possible for the code to detect when that button is being used a lot to check if it's counting properly.
It's tricky because votes are meant to be secret (and voters aren't allowed to have proof of who they voted for, so they can't be coerced into revealing it), while at the same time you want the system to be secure.
Security audits and supervisors from all parties in all steps for starters.
The voting machine prints a total for that machine at the same time that the votes are transferred to the central counting, this process is public, the supervisor from each party get a copy of the total, and one copy is publicly affixed at the voting place, so parallel aggregating from the partial counts is possible (and has been done by sampling).
Internal counting on the voting machine is somewhat validated by picking random voting machines out of the voting places and conducting a parallel voting, publicly broadcasted, on which known amount of votes for each candidate are input and the result from the machine is compared to the expected. Only thing missing that I can think of is actually doing this parallel voting on the same time and place the voting was expected to take place.
Side note: YouTube has a policy about not questioning the results of previous elections. In Brazil, this also includes questions about the security of electronic voting machines.
> YouTube has a policy about not questioning the results of previous elections.
Such an absurd and institutionally biased policy, the USA has on many occasions in the last decade vigorously endorsed the outcomes of clearly rigged elections as a matter of policy. Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
Will big tech remove valid accusations of ballot stuffing because it aligns with US policy?
yes, they even flagged the Tom Scott video about eletronic voting with the following warning:
"The Brazilian electronic voting system allows the exercise of citizenship with greater security. The ballot box was developed to compute votes safely and confidentially, meeting the demand and specific characteristics of Brazil."
So eletronic voting is good or bad depending on what the candidates are.
Bolsonaro, also known as the Trump of the Tropics, is the incumbent far-right candidate for the Brazilian elections. He's widely known for his mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, misoginy, racism, anti-LGBTQ stances and support for fires in the Amazon.
Now that the voting is nearly fully computed, he received roughly 43% of the valid votes (over 50 million). Lula finished in first place with roughly 48% (over 56 million). They are going to run for the second round on the 30th of October.
Because Brazil belongs to BRICS (Brazil Russia India China South Africa), Lula previous government was already amicable with the economic block. He wouln't shoot his own foot to openly condenmn Russia and potentially lose a big economic partner
Is this site legal? I opened it once through Chrome where uBlock Origin runs, and now I just got a mail from a .br address into my inbox (not even the spam folder) https://files.catbox.moe/ijuogv.png
Edit: follow-on question: are the other candidates there pulling more from Bolsonaro or Lula?
Edit2: Looks like both Ciro Gomes and Simone Tebet would draw votes form Lula based on the info on them from Wikipedia. They're drawing about 7% of the vote between the two of them so in a runoff between Bolosonaro and Lula so it seems like most of those votes would go to Lula. Still would be very close.