A urna eletrônica brasileira: entre controvérsias e desinformação

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the debate on the security of the Brazilian Electronic voting machine since the implementation of computerized voting in the country by the Superior Electoral Court, in the early 2000s, until the election year of 2022. We seek to identify different contexts, rhetorical strategies and inflection points. In this sense, we comparatively structured this debate in three distinct moments: during the attempts to implement the printed voting receipt, in 2009 and 2015, and during the 2022 presidential election. To achieve the purpose, integrated Content Analysis is mobilized with the aim of identifying actors, arguments and justifications that permeated the discussion in different spaces and moments. Initially, in 2009, the unit of analysis consisted of statements from a Public Hearing, investigated from the perspectives of the field of studies in Science, Technology and Society (CTS) to map the techno-scientific controversy. Secondly, we started from 2015 to analyze statements made in the 28th Ordinary Joint Legislative Session and examine the political controversy existing in the Brazilian parliament. Finally, we used as a unit of analysis 853 unique pieces of misinformation, collected through checks carried out by nine different fact-checking websites between August 1, 2022 and December 1, 2022, to ascertain whether disinformation about electronic voting machines, predominant in 2022, represents a different phenomenon from that which characterizes controversies. The central hypothesis of the work deduces that, in the current scenario characterized by the decentralization of the production of political information, disinformation about the Electronic voting machine was the result of an agenda carried out by a certain political group with political-electoral interests, not having entered the public's agendas and the media's agendas spontaneously. The results of the study indicated that the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate for re-election affiliated with the Liberal Party (PL), used, in the majority, content intended to attack the Brazilian electoral system based on accusations of electoral fraud and the fragility of Electronic voting machines. Therefore, the fraudulent election's rhetoric did not enter the political agenda of right-wing groups and parties in 2022, but was a strategy nurtured in the face of consecutive defeats by the disadvantaged side in Brazilian presidential disputes.