On Sunday, nearly 119 million Brazilians went to the polls to choose who would serve as the country’s president. That’s about three people for every four who voted in the United States in 2020.
Yet, unlike the hours and days Americans waited to learn who had won the presidency and other races here, Brazilians knew by Sunday night. Soon after the voting was completed, elections officials could announce that former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would return to that job, ousting right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro.
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:
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.)
What one might reasonably wonder following the rapid announcement of Lula’s victory in Brazil is whether a similarly rapid announcement might be newly warranted here — not because of concerns that fraud will occur, given the complete lack of credible evidence that occurred, but because it would limit the ability of bad-faith actors to introduce doubt about the election results. There’s nothing inherently questionable about taking days to count mail-in ballots, but it is worth considering how the aftermath of the 2020 contest would have looked if the final results in each state were announced a few hours after voting was complete.
Put more bluntly: Has the United States reached a point where our own political turmoil might, like Brazil’s a few decades ago, bolster the idea that universal electronic voting is warranted? Or would that simply introduce new points of pressure to limit who votes and how?
For a long time, U.S. elections were able to blend electronic and mail-in voting largely because there was broad confidence in the process from politicians and voters alike. That’s eroded heavily, leaving us in a place where we might look to emerging, shaky democracies for insights.