In a 2018 report, PF points out that centralizing data in the TSE would provide more security for the elections | Elections 2020

Until the previous election, the ballots were transmitted to the computers of the regional electoral tribunals, which added the votes and sent the result to the TSE. This year, the court changed the procedure and centralized the totalization of votes in Brasilia.

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In (15), the first round of the 2020 municipal elections, there was a delay in the totalization of votes and, consequently, in the dissemination of results. According to the TSE, a technical problem caused the slowness.

In an interview on Monday (16), Minister Luís Roberto Barroso, president of the TSE, reported that the centralization of the vote in Brasilia was a recommendation of the Federal Police, for security reasons. The change in the count was approved in the management of Minister Rosa Weber in the presidency of the TSE.

Barroso said that, according to the information technology service of the TSE, the origin of the problem in the totalization of votes – which caused a delay of at least two hours in the disclosure of the results of the count – was the delay in the arrival of a supercomputer.

According to him, the supercomputer service was hired in March, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the equipment only arrived in August, Barroso said. The delay prevented the court’s technical team from performing all the tests necessary for the software to learn to calculate the data with the necessary speed and volume.

The president of the TSE also reported that he requested the Federal Police to open an investigation to investigate the cyber attack on the Electoral Justice systems this Sunday (15), the day of the first round of the municipal elections.

The report was completed by the FP in 2018 after an experience in the system. THE TV Globo had access to excerpts from the document. In the text, PF affirms that the change in the system was a necessary measure to guarantee greater security and had “the potential to continue with satisfactory performance”.

“It is observed that changing the server architecture so that it is physically located in the TSE itself considerably improves the operational security of this system and has the potential to continue with satisfactory performance, due to the increasing advances in network communication technologies” says the report.

According to PF, “even with the use of better coding techniques for the routines stored in the database, this is another point of vulnerability that can be further explored in an environment with databases distributed in each TRE.”

“With the migration of web servers and local databases from TREs to TSE, this exposure is minimized and, in this sense, the database manipulation routines could also be migrated to a web application, where the application server it would contain the intelligence of totalization, reducing the number of professional teams involved and increasing the security of access control to the code and the functionalities of the totalization process ”, says the text.

The TSE affirms that the delay of more than two and a half hours in the disclosure of the results was due to a failure in one of the processors that needed repair and also because the system collapsed due to lack of tests that were not done because the equipment took too much to come. at the TSE due to the pandemic. ”

“The team’s artificial intelligence system was slow to effectively learn this operation. And the delay we had, a little more than hours, was the time it took for the technicians to diagnose the problem and remedy it, “said Barroso.