TSE denies that the delay in publishing the results compromised the counting of votes

Electronic ballot box for voting in Brazilian elections — Photo: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) denied this Tuesday (6) that the delay in releasing data from the presidential elections on Sunday (4) had hampered the holding of the first round.

According to the TSE, messages and videos are circulating on social media stating that there was fraud in the voting results.

In a note, the TSE reported that "a containment in data processing paralyzed one of the modules of the systems used to publish the results on the internet".

Also according to the Electoral Court, the interruption only affected the publication of the results, without prejudice to the counting and totaling of votes.

"When the percentage of data released for president and vice-president reached 64.81%, the containment paralyzed the module responsible for generating the disclosure files for these positions in the “Brazil” view. (...) The stoppage, therefore, occurred during a stage of publishing the results on the internet and did not interrupt the counting of votes through electronic voting machines nor the calculation of totals", said the TSE.

Data on the presidential vote remained almost an hour without being updated.

The TSE explained that, until the data is known, three steps occur:

Counting: carried out by the electronic ballot box itself, in each section, at the end of voting;

Totalization: carried out from the sum of the results obtained in each section;

Disclosure: intended, ultimately, to make the results available to the public.

Furthermore, the TSE said that, after voting closes at 5pm, the Electoral Court carries out different data processing simultaneously, including:

Transmission of ballots, which are documents that record the voting results of each electoral section;

Receipt of these bulletins by the Electoral Court data processing center;

Publication of ballots on the internet;

Processing of ballots;

Support of management and monitoring systems;

Calculation of totals; and

Generation of results disclosure files.

The TSE also reported that, during the interruption in the generation of data dissemination files, ballots continued to be transmitted, received, processed and published on the internet.

Still according to the court, the management and monitoring systems continued to function.

“The generation of “Brazil” visualization files was reestablished at 8:04 pm and, from that moment on, continued without further interruptions,” stated the TSE.