Accounts court to inspect vote bulletins on Election Day

Brazil’s Federal Accounts Court — a sort of audit tribunal that monitors public spending — announced on Friday it will inspect Election Day vote receipts in just over 4,100 electronic voting machines and verify their results against those published online.

On Election Day, after polling stations close, poll workers print out bulletins from ballot boxes, a sort of receipt showing how many votes each candidate got in a given machine. These bulletins have always been in the public domain, obtainable via a QR code reader and allowing results to be compared with those published online by the electoral authority.

As we wrote back in 2018, the possibility of scanning voting bulletins is seen as a feature that proves the system’s reliability.

Brazil’s elections use almost half a million electronic voting machines in 5,570 cities. 

The sample to be inspected by the Accounts Court is larger than the 385 receipts the military reportedly plans to inspect on Election Day. The Defense Ministry has not explicitly denied whether it plans to check the results of the ballot bulletins against those published online by the Superior Electoral Court, which organizes elections in Brazil.

The Superior Electoral Court added the Federal Accounts Court as a “supervisory entity” of the elections in 2019.

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• #transparency