In one of his last moves as Brazil’s chief electoral justice, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin granted permission for nine officers to join a military delegation that will inspect the source code of electronic voting machines. Justice Fachin also extended the deadline for such inspections to occur from August 12 to 19.
The source code running on these machines is at the center of the Jair Bolsonaro administration’s latest efforts to discredit Brazil’s electoral integrity. Most of the institutions who recently inspected the code, however, have kept their findings under wraps.
A source code is the core component of a computer program. It is the set of instructions or statements that define how the software works. In most definitions, a source code is also “human-readable” — it can be understood by humans, at least those with some knowledge of programming language.
In October 2021, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (the institution which organizes elections in the country) made the source code available for several institutions to inspect. Usually, this process starts six months before the election. This time around, the court decided to double that time, in a push against electoral disinformation.
Earlier this month, Defense Minister...
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