What happens if you don't vote?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just because nobody is doing it now doesn't mean you should not be worrying about it.
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.
- 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.