Brazilian vote counting (real time)
resultados.tse.jus.br
resultados.tse.jus.br
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.
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.
(That's for an older model which is still in use, there's also a newer 2020 model.)
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.
- 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.
Just because nobody is doing it now doesn't mean you should not be worrying about it.
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.
I was just commenting on the statement that only fraudsters would be against electronic voting machines.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What happens if you don't vote?
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.
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).
I do hope he wins, for the planet's sake.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://g1.globo.com/politica/eleicoes/2022/pesquisa-eleitor...
(this information is a given for Brazilians, but people who don't speak Portuguese may miss the context)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil
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 : )
None that have been discovered yet at least!
This is the kind of thinking that gets you to "less than 1% of rape accusations are false". How do you know you don't have any problems?
If there's no physical counting, then what are the delegates observing? If the machines were compromised, how could they tell?
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.
No bumps or disproportionate popularity in traditionally unpopular regions to raise suspicion.
> 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?
Why make things so complicated when manual counting works perfectly well??
With auditing being so difficult, you're not even saving any labor.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Great content to read: https://urnaeletronica.info/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326261911_Execucao_... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323470546_The_Retur... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914587_The_Good_...
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.
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?
So eletronic voting is good or bad depending on what the candidates are.
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.
PS: Weirdly.