Dr. Lyall Swim | Chief Innovation Officer
This op-ed was originally published in RealClearPolitics. It was co-authored by Dr. Lyall Swim, Atlas Network Chief Innovation Officer, and Gustavo Gobbi, Head of Communications at Livres.
For any democracy to remain strong, the health of societal institutions matter. Unfortunately for the U.S., trust in these democracy-supporting institutions has been on the decline, with many of these institutions at or near all-time lows according to Gallup. In addition to the trust issues for social institutions, trust is also declining for democratic processes—in particular, the voting process.
While institutions remain critical, no democracy can long survive if voters lose faith in the voting process itself. And on the eve of the current U.S. presidential election, the American voting system seems poised to take several more confidence hits.
The wave of litigation already seems to have reached a fever pitch even before election day has arrived with cases in (a) Arizona where the SCOTUS has granted that proof of citizenship law enforcement may move forward, (b) Alabama where a federal judge has temporarily blocked Alabama officials from implementing a voter removal program, (c) Virginia where the DOJ has sued to block three election reform laws from being implemented, and (d) Arkansas where a federal judge has reinstated a ban on electronic signatures. Further voices on the left and the right are amping up their rhetoric about either voter suppression or stopping the steal 2.0.
Given the growing lack of confidence and mounting litigation, how do we move forward? What are the requirements that should guide voting process reform?
At a basic level, the American voting system should be uniform, easy to use, transparent, and provide results quickly. Such a system would move us a long way toward restoring confidence in our voting system and make it difficult to claim voter suppression or counting manipulation.
The good news is we don’t have to start from scratch in finding a working system that we can learn from and pattern a better voting process. In the Brazilian voting system, we have a ready-made template for updating and improving the way we vote in the United States.
The Brazilian system checks all the boxes. It’s uniform—everyone follows the same steps, with no early voting and standard on-site voting procedures across the country. It is easy to use—a simple registration system and identification of desired voting location. It is transparent—lists are posted publicly at each voting site once the polls close. And the Brazilian system is able to tabulate the results generally in just a couple of hours.
Brazil moved to a uniform voting system in every city of the country in 2000. All voters prove their identity via biometrics and use a simple but highly secure Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), developed by the Brazilian company Omnitech. It has a numeric keypad and a screen in which voters press their candidates’ numbers, verify if their candidates' photos appear on the screen, and then press "correct" or "confirm".
When voting is over, every EVM prints a list of all candidates and their respective amount of votes. The lists are placed in the front of the voting sites for short-term transparency while the EVMs memory cards are encrypted and recorded on data storage devices (flash drives, for example). The devices are sent to Regional Electoral Courts and then on to Superior Electoral Court, where they are decrypted and votes are made public in the presence of all parties’ delegates and international observers.
The process is so efficient that some cities are able to have all votes counted in an hour. In the 2022 presidential election, Lula da Silva's victory was mathematically confirmed less than three hours after the end of voting, with 98.91% of ballots counted.
In the same election where Brazilians also voted for state and national deputies and senators, the voter turnout for the voting eligible population was 79.5 percent, significantly higher than last midterm (46 percent turnout) and presidential (66 percent) elections in the U.S.
Given the pullback from democracy and declining trust in social institutions around the world, America needs to lead the way and do better in restoring confidence in the institutions and processes that ensure a healthy and vibrant representative democracy. One critical step is taking a lesson from our Brazilian neighbors and implementing a voting system that can restore confidence in one of our most basic rights—the right to vote.