Last updated on December 17, 2013

While the national TSE determines policy for the overall electoral process, state-level regional electoral courts (Tribunal Regional Eleitoral – TRE) implement the policy. Both the TSE and state TREs have high levels of project management capacity accumulated through decades of running Brazil’s elections. Election operations are implemented by highly-qualified permanent staff and temporary workers (1.9 million for the 1996 elections). The vast majority of temporary workers in 1996 were poll workers and vote counters in municipalities that retained the paper ballot. In municipalities using electronic voting, the number of required workers was considerably smaller.

The TSE coordinated with the armed forces, the postal service and local governments to distribute voting machines and other materials. For technical assistance with the voting machines, the TSE contracted with a variety of companies. Firms hired in 1996, included HP, Oracle, Embratel, ABASE, MÓDULO and FUBRAS for services, including the creation and maintenance of databases; preparation of EVMs; training of technicians; provision and support for use of flash cards; and security.

There were relatively few problems with electronic voting on Election Day in 1996. In the first round of the election, 74,127 electronic voting machines were used by about a third of the electorate and relatively few machines (3.65%) had some type of problem. According to the TSE, 1.76 percent of the machines had problems due to improper use, .92 percent had hardware malfunctions, .88 percent had software malfunctions and .09 percent had unidentified problems. The TSE noted the attached printers malfunctioned at unacceptably high rates, which contributed to the TSE’s decision to abandon a printed paper trail in future elections. As a result of the printer problems, printed ballots were not used to verify any of the machine vote counts in 1996.

In subsequent years, the error rate has dropped even further. According to the TSE, The failure rate of EVMs is very low (about 0.007%), but if problems do occur, the machines are replaced. If replacement is not possible, then paper ballots are used. The only major logistical problems in subsequent elections occurred in 2008, where a flaw in the code caused widespread problems with a specific brand of memory flash card. In states where EVMs were using this brand of memory card, many voting machines had to be replaced on Election Day. In some cities, specifically Belém, Goiânia and Recife, roughly 30 percent of EVMs had to be replaced.

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Brazil: Design Requirements