Defense Minister Paulo Sergio Nogueira asked the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Minister Edson Fachin, for nine more military personnel to have access to the inspection room for the source codes of the electronic voting machine and the entire electronic voting system.
According to letter sent yesterday (10) by the Defense to the TSE, the nine soldiers in question have knowledge in the C++ and Java programming languages, necessary for the inspection of the source codes.
A team from the Armed Forces carries out the inspection since august 3. According to the letter signed by Nogueira, the nine designated military personnel contributed temporarily to the work, until the day August 19th.
The appointment of the new temporary members by the Defense took place two days after the TSE to have excluded Colonel Ricardo Sant’Anna from the Armed Forces inspection team. The measure was taken because messages published by the military on social media “were labeled as false and lent themselves to militancy against the same electronic voting machines” that he intended to monitor, says a letter signed by Fachin.
In the craft of this fourthOn Friday (10), Paulo Sergio Nogueira told Fachin that he wanted to “renew the permanent dialogue between this Ministry and this Electoral Court, with the main purpose of contributing to strengthening the Brazilian electoral process”.
Source codes are the commands and instructions that make up computer programs, which are used to drive some electronic equipment. In the case of the Electoral Justice, the integrity of the voting system codes is essential to prevent fraud.
Understand
Inspection of the source codes of the electronic voting system is one of the mandatory steps in the electoral process and can be carried out by dozens of authorized institutions. The list includes parties, the Federal Public Ministry (MPF), the Federal Police (PF), universities, the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) and the Armed Forces, among others.
In previous elections, the opening of codes for inspection always took place six months before the election. In the current electoral process, however, the TSE decided to open the access to codes a year before the vote, still in October 2021. At the time, the then president of the electoral court, Minister Luís Roberto Barroso, said that the measure was taken to increase transparency.
However, the inspection of source codes by the Armed Forces began only this month, two days after the Ministry of Defense to have request “very urgent” access to the data. In response, the TSE informed that such access has been open since October, just by registering the team that must carry out the inspection at the courthouse.
