Broadcasting live on Facebook in September 2018, Brazil's then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro raised the possibility of electronic voting machine fraud to benefit his main opponent, Fernando Haddad.
“No one cared,” Leonardo Cazes, who at the time was editor of Fato ou Fake (Fact or Fake), Grupo Globo’s fact-checking service, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
Cazes, now head of reporting at the fact-checking agency Aos Fatos, said that it was at that moment that Bolsonaro began using disinformation to attack electronic voting – the system through which he had been elected federal congressman five times.
From there, according to Cazes, the first wave of misinformation emerged about an alleged fraud to harm Bolsonaro in that election. And on Oct. 7, 2018, the date of the first round of the election, fact-checking units across the country received “an overwhelming amount” of videos and other pieces of misinformation about the voting machine, Cazes said.
“It was a traumatic experience,” he said. Neither journalists nor the Electoral Justice System, the institution responsible for elections in Brazil, were prepared to deal with such a volume of misinformation about the voting machine. “Today we have clarity, but in 2018 we didn’t realize what was happening: that there was a construction, brick by brick, to undermine confidence in the electoral process.”
Six years later, Bolsonaro is disqualified from running for office due to spreading disinformation about electronic voting while he was president and a candidate for re-election. But, the seeds of distrust planted by the former president have taken root in a large part of the population: a recent survey showed 35% of Brazilians believe, without having proof, that the polls were rigged in 2022 to favor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, current president, who beat Bolsonaro in that year’s election.
These Brazilians – as well as those who do not believe that there was fraud in the last election and who are still the majority – are about to return to the polls on Oct. 6, the date of the first round of this year's municipal elections.
How can journalists deal with this scenario and still provide critical coverage of the electronic voting machine in Brazil? A recent publication by Article 19 tries to help. The guide “How to critically cover electronic voting machines without fueling conspiracy theories” explains the different voting technologies used around the world. It also offers reflections to contribute to a more in-depth debate about the electronic voting system used in Brazil, encouraging journalists to directly confront the points that generate distrust among the population.
“Traditional press coverage leaves a little to be desired in this regard,” André Boselli, author of the guide and coordinator of the Information and Communication Technologies Ecosystems program at Article 19, told LJR.
According to him, Article 19’s diagnosis is that the traditional press tends to incorporate the narrative of the Brazilian Electoral Justice System about the electronic voting machine without questioning it properly and responsibly. “Critical coverage of any subject has to minimally counter or at least try to investigate what the institutions are saying,” he said.
Given the misinformation about the electronic voting machine, Boselli said it is understandable that journalists cling to the official narrative that guarantees the security of the electronic voting system. Still, he said that coverage of the voting machine fails to respond to content that misinforms.
“From a technical point of view, the answers end up being too simplistic, not to say naive, so they are unable to truly counter the misinformation and dialogue with the public who would have fallen for the misinformation,” Boselli said.
Cazes said that, in fact, for a long time the Brazilian press relied on the Electoral Justice System’s word about the electronic voting machine, used in elections in the country since 1996. Journalists did not know how the voting machine worked and were not dedicated to understanding the electronic voting system, he said. The population's crisis of trust in institutions, including the press, has caused journalists and electoral authorities to rethink their practices, he said.
“A side effect of misinformation was to pressure the TSE [Superior Electoral Court, for its acronym in Portuguese] to improve its transparency practices,” Cazes said. “It was a journey for everyone involved. The Electoral Justice System understood that it needed to go into a certain level of detail. Over time, they themselves began producing more technical materials with more details about how the voting machine works and nowadays everything is available on the TSE website.”
Journalists, in turn, had to learn the technical intricacies of the electronic voting machine and be able to explain these aspects to the public in a didactic manner – one of the most challenging aspects of this reporting.
“The biggest difficulty is getting familiar with all the technical issues involved, because it is not simple. It’s a technology that involves many steps: sealing, log, certificate, digital signature, hash… These are terms that we had to learn, also to be able to convey them to the reader in understandable Portuguese”, Cazes said.
These lessons also depend on listening to sources beyond the Electoral Justice System who contribute to explaining the functioning of the voting machine and corroborating or criticizing official procedures. Among them are computing professionals and independent researchers who have already participated in public tests of electronic voting machine security, always carried out the year before the elections.
“We talked a lot over the years with experts who are people who study and follow this more technical aspect, mainly people from computer science. And they themselves said, for example, ‘we highlighted a problem in 2016 and it was improved for the following election.’ You see that it is a development that is being made over time of something that has already been greatly improved. We had to learn all of this to deal with misinformation,” Cazes said.
Ítalo Romany, reporter at Agência Lupa, has covered this topic since 2018. In August, he and the Lupa team produced a three-part special on the electronic voting machine, summarizing the history of the device in Brazil, the stages of the voting process and the main pieces of misinformation about the voting machine.
He highlighted that independent sources help to verify the Electoral Justice System’s statements and reinforce the autonomy of reporting in relation to the institution.
“We always reinforce that so far there are no records of fraud [at the voting machine]. But every time we do a verification, we take data that is public, such as the voting tallies. We ask the TSE for clarification, but we check [the public data]. And, as sources, we always have entities that carried out audits and that have no relationship with the TSE and attested that there was no type of fraud,” Romany told LJR.
Cazes said that, over the last six years, misinformation about the voting machine has become more complex, attacking technological aspects of the device.
“Every time we debunked something, a version appeared trying to make [the false allegation] more complex. ‘Ah, it’s the hardware,’ ‘no, it’s the software,’ ‘it’s the transmission of votes,’ ‘it’s the memory card,’” he said.
Romany and Cazes agreed on the perception that pieces of misinformation about the voting machine have been repeated since at least 2018. The Lupa reporter expressed frustration with this “circular” aspect of the work to combat misinformation.
“Something changes, some local context, but [the misinformation] repeats itself. We are now rechecking fakes that we debunked in 2018 or 2020,” Romany said. “Our work is a service, but at the same time it is frustrating. It’s a feeling of drying ice.”
Due to the repetition of the same false claims about the voting machine every election cycle, Cazes has the impression that misinformation has reached a “ceiling.” The challenge now, according to him, is dealing with people who do not believe the information offered by the fact-checks.
“What was possible to explain rationally, we explained. But how do we deal with people who won’t be rationally convinced?” he asked.
Romany suggested that media dedicated to covering the voting machine and combating misinformation about electronic voting in Brazil invest in formats other than text, such as video, to reach broader audiences.
“I think that sometimes we leave aside the older audience, who receive the message on WhatsApp and share it without opening the link,” Romany said. “I think we are failing them and we can think of formats specifically for this audience that has difficulty with reading or with technology.”
