A couple of things to understand about Brazilian elections:
- Voting is mandatory for all citizens aged 18-70, though failing to vote nets you a 4 BRL fine (less than a dollar)^[I understand people who would rather have it be non mandatory, but think about a criminal group ensuring only "their people" go out to vote. With optional voting, it gets easier for them to ensure victory. This would be a real situation in many cities in Brazil, where said criminal groups already do everything in their power to ensure "their guys" get elected.]
- Every Brazilian citizen has an ID with photo (I've only recently learned that USA doesn't have something like a nationwide ID);
- Election happens on a sunday and people who have to work on said day can ask to leave for 2 hours in order to vote;
- Voting is standardized and organized at a federal level, even for municipal voting. The electoral tribunals exist solely for dealing with elections;
- The majority of funds spent on campaigns come from the electoral fund, which is distributed to parties according to how many elected deputies, senators and governors they have (a great way to ensure big parties stay rich and well funded). Up until 2014, corporations could still donate to campaigns. After that, only citizens may donate and only up to 10% of their earnings.
- The electronic urns are audited before and after elections^[This isn't a "we self audited ourselves" situation, in case you're wondering. Universities, Federal Police, Army and several other entities, public and private, can take part in the audit], they are completely offline and save votes to an internal disk. Since their inception, despite many claims, no fault or fraud has ever been found on the hardware or software. Even fucking bozo and his flunkies couldn't find any security breach back in 2022, while he was in power.
- With how urns are distributed, it's easy to account if the total amount of registered votes is equal to the amount of voters that showed up. This first verification is done once voting time is over by the 4 poll workers that care for each urn/section.
- Voters have to do both ID and biometric verification (fingerprint) before voting
- No cell phones or kids go in the booth with you (take a wild guess why "no kids")