Brazil’s electronic voting machines: a history of adoption

In 1986, Brazil began modernizing its elections when it included around 70 million voters in a national electronic registry.

The Justiça Eleitoral, Brazil’s electoral court, then moved to electronically tally election results in 1994. Following this, in 1995, the court formed a technical commission, including researchers from the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais and the Centro Técnico Aeroespacial, to develop a machine specifically for recording votes.

The initial machine, first called the Coletor Eletrônico de Votos, aimed to reduce human intervention in counting and preserve the secrecy of ballots. Before the Justiça Eleitoral’s machine, voters in Brusque, Santa Catarina, tested computer voting in 1989 as part of a series of trials. The first generation of the electronic voting machine, the UE96, debuted in 1996. This machine used a 40 MHz Intel 386SX processor, 2 MB of RAM, and two 1.44 MB floppy disks.

In 1996, Brazil used the new machines in 57 cities, including all 26 state capitals, and towns with over 200,000 people. Over 32 million Brazilians, about one-third of the electorate, voted using the electronic machines that year. By 2000, all polling places used the electronic system, with 353,780 machines serving approximately 109.8 million voters. Subsequent versions of the machine replaced floppy disks with flash memory cards and added features like biometric identification.