Electronic voting made easy in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- If Tuesday's U.S. elections are again mired in technical mishaps, officials may want to draw some lessons from Brazil, where 90 million citizens recently voted with ease in the world's largest electronic election.

Since 1996, Latin America's largest and most populous democracy has gradually moved toward electronic voting. On Wednesday, whether they were in the steamy Amazon or close to southernmost South America in Porto Alegre, Brazilians were able to cast their votes electronically in national elections. When the votes were tallied, there were no hanging chads like those that hung up the U.S. presidential election in 2000.

More than 2 million officials staffed polling stations across the continent-sized nation and tallied the count without complaints of insufficient training or allegations of fraud. Results were tallied electronically minutes after polls closed, and 90 percent of the vote was calculated within a few hours.

Only 1 percent of the electronic polling booths had problems, a number election officials said was much lower than with traditional printed ballots.

On Tuesday, Maryland, Georgia and Texas will experiment with electronic touch-screen computerized voting, and it's likely that other states will consider electronic voting, especially if it reduces the potential for error.

Carlos Velloso, who headed the Supreme Election Tribunal when it began ushering in the electronic era in 1996, said Wednesday that the Brazilian election system is in "a position of vanguard in the eyes of the world." Brazil's electronic voting system relied on technology developed by Unisys Corp. and National Semiconductor Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. Votes were cast on about 325,000 electronic machines, then encrypted and transmitted electronically over secure lines to Brazil's state capitals.