"Father of electronic voting machines" sees great risk in new integrity test proposed by the military and approved by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court).

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Known as the "father of electronic voting machines" for his role in their implementation in 1996, Giuseppe Janino stated in an interview with Reuters that it would be a "great risk" to make changes to the electoral process 20 days before the first round to implement a biometric integrity test as proposed by the Armed Forces. approved by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) this Tuesday.

"Any modification, especially 20 days before the elections, would be completely reckless because there would be no verification, no testing of these procedures, no software resources, no training for the people who would be working on them. Certainly, such a modification would be a great risk," said Janino, who was the Secretary of Information Technology at the TSE for 15 years, a position he left in May of last year.

Following insistence from the Ministry of Defense, the court accepted the military's suggestion to adopt biometric verification as an integrity test for electronic voting machines. The Armed Forces are also planning an unprecedented check, through analysis of the results from a set of voting machines, to verify the total votes.

On Tuesday, the president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Alexandre de Moraes, said that the new biometric test will be carried out on up to 10% of the 648 ballot boxes already planned for the procedure "to verify whether or not this is statistically necessary, because there is no statistical proof that this biometric test improves or hinders oversight."

"The valid integrity test is the traditional test, which has increased from 100 ballot boxes to 640 ballot boxes in these elections," said the president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court).

The improvement in methodology proposed by the Defense Ministry comes at a time when the president and candidate for re-election, Jair Bolsonaro (PL), is fueling, without evidence, a fear of fraud in next month's elections, endorsed by part of the military leadership.

Until the last election, the integrity test was always carried out at the Regional Electoral Courts (TREs). This process consists of removing a ballot box from the polling station and, on election day, conducting an open vote using paper ballots, followed by typing the candidates' numbers in a closed environment. Afterwards, it is verified whether there is a correspondence between what was typed on the electronic ballot box keyboard and the vote on the paper ballot.

According to the Armed Forces' proposal, now approved, the electronic voting machine would remain in the polling station on election day, and voters would cast their ballots normally. Afterwards, one voter would be invited to perform an integrity test on another electronic voting machine in an adjacent room. They would use their biometrics to unlock the machine being tested and would then be dismissed. The remainder of the test would be carried out by Electoral Court officials, as is currently done by the Regional Electoral Courts.

According to the former head of technology at the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), the way this step-by-step process will be implemented and communicated will be crucial in achieving positive effects, such as increasing the transparency of the electoral process.

"It is necessary to make it very clear to the voter that he is participating in an audit, and not exactly in the voting process, and that the purpose of that vote will be solely to verify the integrity of the voting and vote counting process," said Janino, who spoke to Reuters before and after the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) made its decision on the change.

For the military, the new biometric integrity test is one of the key points in the agreement with the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), according to a high-ranking Army official with knowledge of the negotiations between the Ministry of Defense and the TSE, who spoke to Reuters.

"Confidence in the outcome depends on the integrity test," highlighted this military source interviewed by Reuters.

The proposal that was ultimately approved would be one of the topics of a new meeting that the president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Alexandre de Moraes, would hold with the Minister of Defense, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, and technicians, according to sources involved in the negotiations on both sides. Moraes had already been signaling behind the scenes that he might accept the suggestion.

CHECKING

However, the meeting was canceled after unease arose at the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) following a report by Folha de S.Paulo on Monday, which claimed that the military had an agreement with the court to carry out a "parallel count" involving the monitoring of 385 ballot box reports (BUs) intended to verify the votes and compare them with the court's official results.

The Ministry of Defense rejects calling this initiative a parallel count and instead calls it a "sampling verification of the vote tally," according to the military source interviewed by Reuters. They wanted access to the raw tally data to facilitate the verification process, but if this is not granted, they will proceed anyway, using tally data available from the court online.

The military will take photos of the ballot boxes at specific polling stations and send them to a team that will verify the votes. They want to present the results of the verification on the same day that the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) will finalize its count.

Members of the Armed Forces want to analyze whether there is a correspondence between the court's tally and the verification they will carry out. If there isn't, according to the source, they will present the points of divergence to the court, which will then be responsible for taking action—if it so wishes.

Contacted for comment, the Ministry of Defense did not respond.

According to Giuseppe Janino, in past elections there was already the possibility for the Armed Forces or other institutions to carry out independent checks.

"I see nothing new in using these mechanisms, which have been available for a long time and are sufficient elements for an audit," he said.

Following the publication of the Folha newspaper report, the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) released a clarification note stating that there had been no change to what was defined in the first half of the year regarding "any agreement with the Armed Forces or oversight entities to allow differentiated access in real time to the data sent for the tabulation of the electoral process by the TREs (Regional Electoral Courts), the execution of which is a constitutional responsibility of the Electoral Justice system."

"Anyone interested can go to the polling stations and freely add up the ballot box reports from one, ten, 300, or all of the ballot boxes," the court continued in a statement.

Jair Bolsonaro has said that he will respect the election results as long as they are "transparent and clean"—without specifying what that means. He himself has even suggested the possibility of a parallel count carried out by the Armed Forces.

Since the return to democracy, the military has participated in organizing elections in Brazil, providing logistical and security support. Under Bolsonaro, part of the military leadership began to echo the president's distrust, and the military ended up being invited by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) to participate, along with other institutions, in a body to discuss the transparency of the system and to oversee the voting process.

The official deadlines for collaboration in this instance have already passed, but the military had been insisting on implementing changes even in this election -- which was denied by the previous head of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Edson Fachin, but now accepted by Moraes.

Until the discord on Monday among the military personnel involved, according to this source, the assessment was that Moraes has been adopting a series of initiatives to reduce disagreements between the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) and the Ministry of Defense, and that the conversations had been technical and productive.

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