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The claim in a Facebook post that votes were “secretly counted” in municipal elections and that this would constitute fraud is false. In fact, the scrutiny is not secret, since, at the end of the voting time, the same data that is transmitted to the totalization system is printed in the form of ballots and can be controlled by anyone.
This year there was a delay in the release of the results of the municipal elections, but, according to the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), the scrutiny was carried out normally and the delay was caused by the slowness of the system in charge of adding the votes, which is the sum of the counting of each vote. urn.
How do we verify it?
We contacted the Superior Electoral Court to find out how the vote counting and totalization systems work. The court responded by email, through the press office, and sent a video explaining the difference between the two procedures.
We also consulted reports with details on the subject and on the delay in the sum of the votes that took place this year, in the first round.
We contacted the page of the Movimiento Avança Brasil, responsible for posting on Facebook, but we did not receive a response until the publication of this text. The post, dated November 16, was no longer available the next day, but we couldn’t confirm whether it was removed by Facebook or the page owners. The content is still available in other shared posts.
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Was Sunday’s count secret?
Although the vote is secret, the scrutiny is carried out in a transparent way, in real time, and the accounting is auditable. Before voting begins, the owner of each voting station casts a ballot called zeros, which ensures that no votes were counted there before the process opened.
Any citizen, including representatives of parties and public authorities, can participate in two audits that are carried out at the polls immediately before the vote: one of operation, which simulates a vote, and another for verification of authenticity, which allows the verification of digital signatures.
When the vote is over, the section chief writes a password on the ballot box that prevents new votes from being counted there. The team emits the Ballot Box, with the total of votes received in that device for each candidate, political party, blank votes, null, section number, identification of the ballot box and the number of voters who voted in that section. This bulletin is printed and attached to the sectional door. Thus, anyone who wants to check the result of that ballot box has access to the material.
Other copies of this bulletin are given by the section chief to the people who follow the voting on the spot: representatives of political parties and the prosecutor, for example. The votes from each ballot box are registered in a file called the Digital Voting Registry (RDV) and sent to an access point, but not before receiving a digital signature, a public act. The ballot box bulletins are also available on the official TSE website.
In practical terms, therefore, the counting of the votes is carried out in the section itself, based on the ballot issued by the polls. Official disclosure, on the other hand, is part of the vote tallying process: the sum of the votes counted in each section and electoral zone. This year, for the first time, the TSE centralized totalization. Previously, each Regional Electoral Court (TRE) carried out this procedure and sent the data to the Superior Court.
A report published by BBC Brazil on November 13 this year – two days before the vote – shows that the TSE carries out a series of procedures to guarantee security in the voting process and that most experts agree on that the security of votes increased since the adoption of electronic voting machines in the country.
What is the difference between totalization and calculation?
In a video posted on its official YouTube channel on October 26 this year, the TSE explains the difference between counting and adding votes. Once the voting is finished, the electronic ballot box calculates the votes and issues the so-called ballot box. “After receiving the data sent by the electoral zones or directly via satellite, the TREs begin the process of totalizing the votes,” says an excerpt from the video.
This year, however, the totalization process was carried out by the TSE itself, in an attempt to generate more savings, according to the court. “The change is precisely the centralization of this process. A computational cloud has formed and this cloud allows the so-called elasticity or resource sharing in terms of processing. This means that everyone has the same conditions and capacity and receives the processing potential to be measured. where there is demand “, explains Giuseppe Janino, IT secretary of TSE.
To sum the votes, the information stored in the ballot box, the same information that was printed on the ballot at the end of the vote, is recorded in the results media, digitally signed and encrypted. This medium is then taken to a transmission point, connected through a private network. There, the information is transferred to the TSE. As these results arrive, they are captured by the results disclosure system, which is the one that makes the disclosure to the population through the TSE Results application.
To delay
In recent years, the totalization of votes was completed quickly and, about two hours after the closing of the voting, the Brazilians already knew who was chosen in the election. This year, however, there was a delay in disclosure. The city of São Paulo, for example, took a few hours until the totalization left 0.39% of the polls and reached 37.77%, which only happened around 10:20 pm. A little later, the total reached 57.77%.
Still on the night of last Sunday (15), around 7:30 p.m., the TSE reported, in a note, that a slowness in the totalization of votes was causing a delay in the dissemination of the results through the web and app of court. The TSE also reported that the problem was not with the regional courts, which normally sent the data to the cloud, but with the totalization bank, which was doing the summing slowly. According to the TSE, the delay was not related to the attempted cyberattack suffered on Sunday morning, which was neutralized and did not compromise the security of the elections, as this verification by Comprava demonstrated.
On Monday (16), the president of the TSE, Minister Luís Roberto Barroso, reported that he hired a company, Oracle, to provide a supercomputer to carry out the task of adding votes, as this other verification of Comprava demonstrated. However, due to the pandemic, there was a delay in the delivery of the equipment: the purchase was made in March and the supercomputer only arrived in August. For this reason, the technical team of the court says that it has not carried out enough preliminary tests. Barroso said that part of the tests were done by videoconference, which hurt the organization.
Why do we investigate?
In the third phase, the Comprava Project investigates suspicious content related to the covid-19 pandemic, public policies and elections. On the day of the first round of this year, the publications about a possible fraud went viral, using as an argument the delay that occurred in the totalization of votes. The publications did not have strong evidence about the accusation.
The investigated publication suggests problems in the counting of votes in this year’s elections and misinforms when talking about “secret recount.” The publication reached more than 11 thousand interactions on Facebook. The speech that tries to discredit the electronic voting system used in Brazil is frequent, and even adopted by President Jair Bolsonaro. In the months leading up to the elections, Comprava already reviewed rumors about the supposed Venezuelan origin of the electronic ballot boxes, about a document that, contrary to what the author of a video alleged, does not prove irregularities in the 2018 presidential elections, and already has clarified that the voting system can be audited.
False, for Comprava, is content deliberately invented and disseminated to spread a lie.
* The material was produced by vehicles belonging to the Comprava project: Alma Preta, Correio, Niara, O Povo and Rádio BandNews FM
