POLITICS-BRAZIL: Local Elections, a Source of Pride – and Shame

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 30 2004 (IPS) - When local elections are held throughout Brazil on Sunday, the country can once again feel a sense of pride in its totally automated voting system – something that even many developed countries cannot boast.

But these elections have also served to highlight a number of shameful realities in Brazil, like the high illiteracy rate and the difficulties faced by women in gaining access to elected posts, despite an electoral quota law.

Almost 120 million Brazilians (out of a total population of 178 million) are registered in the country’s 5,562 municipalities to elect new mayors and city councillors for a four-year term. There are a total of 362,610 candidates, and of the 15,793 who are running for mayor, 2,801 are seeking re-election.

Electronic ballot boxes were first introduced in Brazil in 1996, and will be used in practically all of the country’s electoral districts in the upcoming local elections. Paper ballots will only be used in the event of problems with the distribution of the voting machines or mechanical failure.

Automated voting systems allow for election results to be known in a matter of hours or even minutes.

Brazil has become a world leader in electronic voting systems, and has even begun to export or loan its machines to other countries in Latin America and Africa.

The use of a computerised system initially caused concern over the potential for fraud, since paper ballots can be recounted, but electronic ballots cannot, unless there is a paper receipt.

These doubts have been allayed to some extent through the installation of printers with some machines. A paper ballot is printed each time a vote is cast, and a sampling of these can be counted and compared to the official tally to rule out any irregularities.

Holding an election in Brazil is a gargantuan task, given the massive number of voters and the vast size of the country (almost 8.6 million square kilometres). A veritable army of volunteers is involved in the process. Voter abstention is traditionally low in Brazil – between 10 and 15 percent – since voting is compulsory.

The overwhelming responsibility for controlling this process falls to the electoral justice system, composed of regional electoral courts in each of the country’s 26 states and a central Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) based in the capital, Brasilia.

Brazil’s technologically advanced automated voting system became an even greater source of pride after the U.S. presidential elections in 2000, when irregularities in the counting of paper ballots in the state of Florida allowed George W. Bush to assume the presidency without actually winning the popular vote.

But Brazil’s highly developed voting system contrasts sharply with other realities brought to light by the upcoming elections. Of all the candidates originally registered, over three percent were disqualified and forced to pull out of the race. In most cases this was a result of registration errors, but there were at least several hundred taken out of the running for another reason: they are illiterate.

Brazilian law guarantees illiterate people the right to vote, but prohibits them from being elected to political posts.

The educational level of the candidates is low in general. According to statistics from the TSE, 4.9 percent have never attended school, although they claim they can read and write, 24.2 percent have only a primary school education (which is eight years in Brazil), and a mere 15.8 percent are university graduates.

The number of women represented in these elections is another source of troubling statistics. They account for just 9.33 percent of mayoral candidates and 22.14 of candidates for city council positions.

Eight years ago, Brazil adopted a quota law which stipulates that at least 30 percent of candidates for legislators and city councillors must be women. But because the measure is not compulsory, and there are no penalties for failing to comply, the law is more of a recommendation than anything else, according to Giane Boselli, an attorney from the Feminist Studies and Advisory Centre, a non-governmental institution.

The small increase in the number of women candidates – a mere three percent more than in the 2000 local elections – has been a source of frustration for women’s organisations, Boselli told IPS.

“We were expecting more,” she said, especially after the number of female candidates climbed 40 percent in the 2002 federal elections, despite the fact that lawmakers must relocate to the national capital of Brasilia, a potentially strong disincentive for women.

Without a wide-ranging reform of the electoral system – including closed lists of candidates put forward as a party slate and public funding for election campaigns – it will be very difficult for Brazilian women to achieve the kind of representation in government enjoyed by their counterparts in countries like Argentina and Costa Rica, Boselli argued.

Another source of frustration – and embarrassment – is the number of candidates with criminal records.

The head of the Regional Electoral Court in Rio de Janeiro, Marcus Faver, has been fighting particularly hard to have these candidates disqualified, and for good reason. The local newspaper O Globo recently reported that close to 20 percent of the 1,132 candidates running for city council in Rio are facing criminal charges.

The TSE and other legal experts have deemed that it would be unconstitutional to remove them from the ballots, because even if they have been tried and convicted by lower courts, they could still appeal to a higher court and ultimately be acquitted. As a result, very few candidates have been taken out of the running because of legal troubles.

In all, slightly more 11,000 candidates were disqualified throughout the country, most of them as a result of irregularities, such as failing to meet the requirement of belonging to the political party they represent for at least one year.

Candidates removed from the ballots by regional electoral courts have the right to appeal to the TSE, which consequently has the gargantuan task of hearing more than 3,300 cases before the elections take place.

“Vote buying” is another shameful reality of Brazilian elections. The Chamber of Deputies is waging a campaign, complete with radio and television announcements and tens of thousands of leaflets, to inform the public that it is a crime to swap votes for money, donations or promises of any type of personal gain.

Be that as it may, it was a crime committed by six percent of the country’s citizens in the 2000 elections, according to a study by Transparency Brazil, an organisation dedicated to fighting corruption.