Yeap, like I said: you need a relatively healthy democracy for the community counting to work. This wasn't the case of Brazil 30 years ago: Brazil was a military dictatorship until 1985. In 1996 when these electronic voting machines debuted, a large portion of the country was pretty much owned by a small number of families linked to the old regime. That's especially true for relatively uninhabited areas such as the states around the Amazon rainforest, where population density is in the single digits per square mile.
Brazil has another particularity in comparison to the US and some other countries: we don't have a 2 party system, we have a lot of parties. It's probably around 30 today, but used to be more. It's impractical for each party to have people on every voting hall. It's much easier to oversee hardware and software production of the machines.
Is it still possible to intimidate or bribe this handful of key people? Probably yes, but as far as we know that never happened, and the parties are very obstinant in how they oversee the whole process.
One thing I definitely think we lose is the sense of community, especially in times like these when individualism is on the rise: we employ a couple people on each voting section, maybe a cople dozen on each voting hall. In the end of election day they simply run the closing protocol and go home. Having a bunch of folks counting votes for a few days definitely could make people more engaged with the election, and with democracy overall. The "electronicness" of the whole thing alienates people from the process.
Brazil has another particularity in comparison to the US and some other countries: we don't have a 2 party system, we have a lot of parties. It's probably around 30 today, but used to be more. It's impractical for each party to have people on every voting hall. It's much easier to oversee hardware and software production of the machines.
Is it still possible to intimidate or bribe this handful of key people? Probably yes, but as far as we know that never happened, and the parties are very obstinant in how they oversee the whole process.
One thing I definitely think we lose is the sense of community, especially in times like these when individualism is on the rise: we employ a couple people on each voting section, maybe a cople dozen on each voting hall. In the end of election day they simply run the closing protocol and go home. Having a bunch of folks counting votes for a few days definitely could make people more engaged with the election, and with democracy overall. The "electronicness" of the whole thing alienates people from the process.