Auditor flags risks in Estonia’s internet voting beside Brazil’s machines

Florencia Ferrer, chief executive of e-stategiapublica, which has audited elections in 17 countries, said Brazil’s system is the most modern and secure in the world. She contrasted it with other electronic methods: in India, she said, votes are electronic but each voter receives a printed version to take home, which weakens voter safety and raises coercion. She added that Estonia’s internet voting and the Philippines’ electronically tallied paper ballots carry their own risks.

Her comments came as Brazil’s Oct. 4 presidential vote drew attention to voting security ahead of the U.S. midterms. About 125 million Brazilians voted on machines that print no paper ballots. Less than four hours after polls closed, the race was headed to a runoff between conservative challenger Flavio Bolsonaro and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Brazilians vote again this coming Sunday, Oct. 25, and the winner is expected to be known and certified in under five hours.

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court says the system, in place for more than three decades and the largest digital voting system deployed, has had no proven fraud since its 1996 debut. Nearly nine in ten voters unlock the machines with a fingerprint. The 499,248 machines used on Oct. 4 never connected to the internet. Their software was open to inspection for 11 months before being digitally signed and sealed, and last December a record 149 outsiders were invited to try to break it. Evaluators concluded that nothing they found could alter results or reveal how anyone voted.

At closing, every machine prints its tally, posted at the polling place with a QR code so it can be checked against the national count. The court told Fox News Digital that each file’s digital signature confirms the result was produced by the machine registered for that station. Political scientist Karina Stange Calandrin said corrupting the system would require breaking each machine’s seal and installing software that would not match the official version, a scale of collusion that could not pass undetected.

Security researchers say a clean record is not proof enough. The Carter Center has said voters should at least see a printed version of their ballot deposited in a separate part of the machine. Germany’s top court ruled in 2009 that voters must be able to check their ballot without expert help, effectively barring a Brazilian-style system. Paraguay, which adopted the machines permanently in 2006, now uses versions that print each individual vote.

Ferrer also said Washington and the rest of the United States lag in both technology and security on election day, where voting is run across thousands of local jurisdictions and about 30 percent of 2024 ballots arrived by mail. She said the question is not whether Brazil invented a perfect machine, but whether democracies can combine fast digital tabulation with independent verification, public scrutiny and rules that citizens across the political spectrum have reason to trust.