Brazil’s Fast Election Count Puts Voting Security in Focus Ahead of US Midterms

About 125 million Brazilians cast ballots on Oct. 4 using machines that produce no paper ballot. Within four hours of the polls closing, the country knew the presidential race would proceed to a runoff between conservative challenger Flavio Bolsonaro and leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Brazil has relied on this process for more than three decades, making voters familiar with its speed, simplicity, accuracy and routine. The system undergoes extensive audits, operates entirely offline and is the world’s largest digital voting network.

With the U.S. midterm elections 11 days away, analysts say Brazil’s model could point Americans toward a more secure voting system.

Brazil’s election system has drawn widespread praise and was cited in President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order on elections as an example of biometric voter identification. At the same time, Brazil continues to use the paperless voting machines Trump has promised to eliminate.

Over time, Brazil linked federal, state and municipal databases to create a digital voter record. That system allows election officials to verify a voter’s identity, eligibility and whether the person has already voted—often through biometrics. Nearly nine out of 10 voters unlock their machines with a fingerprint.

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, known as the TSE, designs the machines and supervises elections. It says no fraud has been proven since the system was introduced in 1996. None of the 499,248 machines used on Oct. 4 connected to the internet. Their software was available for inspection by political parties, universities and election-monitoring groups for 11 months before being digitally signed and sealed in public. Last December, the government invited a record 149 outside experts to test the system’s defenses. The evaluators said they found nothing that could change the results or expose how an individual voted.

On Election Day, officials feed paper ballots into randomly selected machines while cameras roll and federal auditors and international observers monitor the process and record the results.

When voting ends, every machine prints a tally for its polling station. Officials post that document outside the station, along with a QR code, allowing anyone to compare it with the national count. In an email to News Media, the TSE said the digital signature on each file “confirms that the result was produced by the electronic voting machine registered for that polling station.”

Karina Stange Calandrin, a political scientist and professor at Instituto Brasileiro de Mercado de Capitais (IBMEC), said Brazil’s system brings together three features rarely combined: electronic voting, local storage of votes hashed to voter eligibility and automated counting.

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“It is an extremely secure and safe system. The machines never connect to the Internet, and even the central database used to transmit tallies to the TSE must match the results produced physically and locally by every individual machine, without human interference,” she said. Any attempt to compromise the process would require breaking the seal on each machine and installing software that did not match the TSE’s authorized version. That would automatically invalidate the tally and require such extensive cooperation that it “simply could not pass undetected,” she said.

The machines faced their most serious political challenge in 2022, when former President Jair Bolsonaro spent years questioning their credibility without evidence. Bolsonaro, who was later sentenced to 27 years for plotting to overturn his defeat that year, is currently serving his sentence under house arrest.

For the first time this year, the TSE was led by a Bolsonaro appointee, Justice Kassio Nunes Marques. Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, placed first with 47% of the vote, ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with 45%. The machines that became central to the elder Bolsonaro’s claims could now help deliver the presidency to his son.

Florencia Ferrer, CEO of e-stategiapublica, which has audited elections in 17 countries, considers Brazil’s model the world’s most modern and secure. “In India votes are electronic, but each voter gets a printed version of their vote to take home, which weakens voter safety and augments coercion rates,” she said. She added that Estonia’s internet voting system and the Philippines’ use of electronically tabulated paper ballots present different risks.

An engineer from the University of São Paulo’s Polytechnic School who audited the machines in 2014 also endorsed the system. The engineer declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the work. “While no system is completely infallible… we have found no traces of tampering, wrong-doing or malicious intent,” the engineer told News Media.

Critics nevertheless argue that the system requires greater scrutiny. Security researchers say an unblemished record alone does not prove that the machines are secure. The Carter Center has said voters should at least be able to see a printed version of their ballot deposited into a separate section of the machine; without that safeguard, confidence in the results depends entirely on software. In 2009, Germany’s top court ruled that voters must be able to verify their ballots without expert assistance, a standard that effectively barred a Brazilian-style system.

Brazil has supplied its voting technology primarily through loans to countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Paraguay became the first country to adopt the system permanently in 2006, although its machines now print each individual vote.

“It’s obvious Washington and the remainder of the U.S. are way behind both technology as well as security when it comes to polling on voting day,” Ferrer said. U.S. elections are run in thousands of local jurisdictions under 50 sets of state rules and about 30% of 2024 ballots came by mail, which is slower to process. Brazil has one national election authority, compulsory voting and no mail-in ballots.

Brazilians will vote this coming Sunday on Oct. 25. The winner is expected to be known and certified in under five hours.

“The question is not whether Brazil has invented a perfect voting machine. No voting system is perfect. It is whether democracies can combine the speed and consistency of digital tabulation with independent verification, public scrutiny and rules that citizens across the political spectrum have reason to trust,” Ferrer said.