The bug hadn’t been known previously,yet experts said it also didn’t affect results. Each voting machine can still be easily identified through other means,like its city and voting district,according to Wilson Ruggiero,a professor of computer engineering and digital systems at the Polytechnic School of the University of Sao Paulo.
Diego Aranha,an associate professor of systems security at Aarhus University in Denmark,who hasconcede participated in official security tests of Brazil’s electoral system,agreed.
“It does not undermine the reliability or credibility in any way,” Ruggiero he said. “The key point that guarantees correctness is the digital signature associated with each voting machine.”
While the machines don’t have individual identification numbers in their internal logs,those numbers do appear on printed receipts that show the sum of all votes cast for each candidate,said Aranha,adding the bug was only detected due to the efforts by the electoral authority to provide greater transparency.
Bolsonaro’s less than two-point loss to Lula in the final contest was the narrowest margin since the country’s 1985 return to democracy. While the president hasn’t explicitly cried foul,he has refused to concede defeat or congratulate his opponent,leaving room for supporters to draw their own conclusions.
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Many have been protesting relentlessly,making claims of election fraud and demanding that the armed forces intervene.
Dozens of Bolsonaro supporters gathered outside his news conference on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT),decked out in the green and yellow of the national flag and chanting patriotic songs. Some verbally attacked and pushed journalists trying to enter the venue.
Bolsonaro spent more than a year claiming Brazil’s electronic voting system was prone to fraud,without ever presenting evidence.
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Brazil began using an electronic voting system in 1996 and some election security experts consider such systems less secure than hand-marked paper ballots because they leave no auditable paper trail. But Brazil’s system has been closely scrutinised by domestic and international experts who have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud.
The Senate’s president,Rodrigo Pacheco,said the election results were “unquestionable”.
Bolsonaro has been almost completely secluded in the official residence since his defeat,inviting widespread speculation as to whether he is dejected or plotting to cling to power.
In an interview with newspaperO Globo,Vice President Hamilton Mourão chalked up Bolsonaro’s absence to erysipelas,a skin infection on his legs that he said prevented the president from wearing pants.
But his son Eduardo Bolsonaro,re-elected as federal MP,has been more direct.
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“We always distrusted these machines. ... We want a massive audit,” the younger Bolsonaro said last week at a conference in Mexico City. “There is very strong evidence to order an investigation of Brazil’s election.”
For its audit,the Liberal Party hired the Legal Vote Institute,a group that has been critical of the current system,saying it defies the law by failing to provide a digital record of every individual vote.