America’s Electoral System Is Vulnerable. It Can Learn From Brazil.

For months before Brazil’s presidential election runoff on Oct. 30, far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro questioned the integrity of the country’s electoral institutions and public officials, building a case to challenge a potential defeat at the polls. But when Bolsonaro lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, those very institutions preempted and ultimately shut down any attempts to undermine confidence in the plebiscite. In the wake of the election, Bolsonaro was silent.

Bolsonaro is no fragile Amazon flower. Strident, bombastic, and shameless, he has drawn constant comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump. Like Trump in 2020, Bolsonaro previously said that the only way he might lose this election would be through fraud, and many observers feared he might leverage the military to organize a coup—but he did not. For the United States, Bolsonaro’s lack of action after the vote shows what it will take to prevent another election dispute in 2024.

The U.S. political system is arcane, slow, and confusing. This is by design: The country’s founders drafted a constitution intended to check the will of the majority through the Electoral College and validation of the results by each state and the U.S. Congress. As a result, the United States has around 4,800 local administrative units, each politically controlled, that manage the machinery behind the ballot box. Only slightly modified from its original conception, the unwieldy system reflects the founders’ aversion to centralized control. Today, a tangled web of local election laws meant that the midterm elections in November did not lead to a clear outcome in Congress until a week after the last ballots were cast.

Although the U.S. electoral system prevents control by one institution, the world has witnessed its vulnerability to manipulation—by Trump, but also by foreign disinformation campaigns, internet trolls, and others. Brazil’s election had little of this. It has conspiracy theorists; they proliferate in today’s world. But compared to the United States, Brazil’s election mechanics are hypermodern. Brazil has a suite of tools that have ensured electoral legitimacy, born in response to previous challenges to democracy.

To start, Brazil has established a constitutionally independent and specialized court that resolves election disputes, reinforced by an independent prosecutor’s office. Second, the Brazilian electoral system is more centralized at the federal level, unlike the diffuse U.S. system. Finally, its crown jewel is an electronic voting system that counted all votes in just over three hours and swiftly certified the result before anyone could sow doubts about its legitimacy.

Not to be deterred, three conservative parties filed a lawsuit alleging that a trivial software bug merited nullifying votes from around 60 percent of voting machines. Brazil’s elections chief dismissed the complaint and fined the parties $4.3 million for filing it. Brazil’s courts are not immune to accusations of partisanship. Bolsonaro’s conservative base has since decried both the court’s fine and its heavy-handed measures to regulate so-called fake news, which hurt Bolsonaro’s campaign more than Lula’s.

Before assembling its independent electoral system, Brazil suffered multiple interruptions in democratic governance and two decades of military dictatorship—something Americans certainly do not want to endure. But it is surprising that Trump’s 2020 election dispute and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were not enough for Democrats and Republicans to open their minds to electoral reform.

In theory, Republicans should be the most invested in such reform. Republican public officials have consistently contested the results of the 2020 presidential election and demanded recounts, citing human error, mechanical error, voter fraud, and missing ballots. Wouldn’t a centralized system without paper ballots be appealing? When Ipsos polled Americans just before the 2022 midterms, 74 percent of Republicans said voter fraud is a “widespread problem” and they were concerned that the “election is rigged,” compared to minorities of independents and Democrats.

For their part, Democrats would surely also prefer a federalized election system that removes the variable of state institutions and legislatures, a majority of which Republicans currently control. Both parties, which have sued their opponents to declare election laws unconstitutional or to penalize opposing candidates and parties for violating election rules, should prefer courts with apolitical judges to weigh in on these issues. The endless cycle of appeals would, at last, end.

Finally, a federalized system would economize party resources—not to mention state resources; elections are expensive to run. Parties and political movements would no longer need to spend as much time and money monitoring election administration across 50 states. Citizens’ tax dollars would go toward a single institution that is impenetrable and uncorruptible.

Of course, doing so would require placing trust in distant bureaucrats and officials in Washington—the types of people many Americans often distrust. According to Ipsos, most Americans across the political spectrum trust their local election officials (83 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of Republicans). Substantial majorities say their own ballots will be accurately counted in the current system. External forces are the perceived source of corruption—so any new system would need to persuade people of the centralized process.

There is hope. Despite frequent reports about Republicans buying into the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, significantly more Republicans have confidence that their ballot will be accurately counted in 2022 (66 percent) than before the 2020 vote (54 percent). In the past two years, scrutiny and press coverage may have persuaded millions of people about election security and mechanics. Imagine the publicity if the system were modernized.

More pessimistically, Trump himself was largely absent from discussions about election integrity in 2022 because he was not running for office. If he returns to the ballot in 2024, it remains uncertain how well the U.S. electoral system would weather a new crisis of confidence. But it should not take the United States what it took Brazil to secure their elections—the challenge of 2020 should be enough. The United States has a lot to learn from its southern neighbor. When it comes to election governance, let “Ordem e Progresso” be the United States’ motto, too.