World leader in electoral solutions, Smartmatic, is now ready to assist the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, Brazil’s top election authority, to hold the second round of the Brazilian municipal elections on October 28, 2012.
During the first round (10/07/2012), Smartmatic contributed to the overall success of the process by providing Broadband Global Area Network satellite devices to support data and voice communications across some of the most isolated states of Brazil. Also, Smartmatic gave elections support and battery maintenance to the voting machines. These services implied the hiring and training of 14,000 technicians across the 27 states of Brazil and 5,568 municipalities, who worked at 480,000 polling stations.
Brazilian two-round system forces authorities to organize a deciding round of elections when none of the contending candidates obtains more than 50% of the votes cast in cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants. In the second round the two candidates with highest percentages of votes received will face each other.
For the upcoming elections, the services to be provided will be the same; however, since not every election resulted in the need for a second round, the overall scope of Smartmatic’s participation will be much smaller. Out of the fifty cities which will need a second round, 17 are state capitals.
In spite the fact that in Brazil voting is compulsory, voter turnout was around 83.33% according to the TSE, with some 115 million voters participating and 23 million abstaining.
Smartmatic is honored to be a part of these two processes. As Smartmatic’s CEO expressed before the first round of the elections: “For Smartmatic it has been a great achievement and a great honor to provide our support services to the Brazilian High Electoral Court, not only due to the scope of the technical deployment, but also because Brazil has been a pioneer in electronic voting”, stated Antonio Mugica.