For the first time, the entire country used machines in the first-round balloting on Oct. 6. Despite a few hitches, they worked well and will be used again in Sunday's runoff, the Superior Electoral Tribunal said.
"The voting machine is, without a doubt, one of the big winners of the election," said Armando Cardoso, a spokesman for tribunal in Brasilia, the capital.
Other countries have shown interest in the machines, which were designed and built in Brazil, Cardoso said. Among them are the United States, Japan, Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala.
This week, Brazil signed an agreement with the United Nations to share its electronic voting technology with member nations.
"The Brazilian experience is significant, not only for being the first member state to adopt electronic voting in all of its elections, but also for the dimension of the exercise involving over 115 million voters in urban and remote quarters of its vast territory," said Marco Carmignani, the senior political affairs officer of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division.
The Oct. 6 election was the biggest in the nation's history. Brazilians cast ballots for president, state governors, senators and federal and state representatives.
"The voting machines functioned almost flawlessly," said Eliana Passarelli, a spokeswoman for the Sao Paulo State Electoral Tribunal. "There were some problems that slowed down the process and delayed the final tally, but none of them can be attributed to the machine."
Passarelli blamed the delays on a shortage of machines, confusion among voters and poorly trained election monitors. The results, expected within hours, were announced almost three days later.
"I would say that the amount of time it took to count all the ballots and the fact that machines provided accurate and fraud-free results, puts Brazil in the first world in terms of elections," she added.
The box-like machines have a small screen and a telephone-style keypad. Voters punch in the candidate's assigned number and check it against a photo that pops up on the screen, then press the "confirm" key to register their vote.
Sunday's election will be easier, and Passarelli said 90 percent of the ballots should be counted within seven hours. Brazilians will choose between Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Jose Serra for president, and in 14 states and the federal district of Brasilia voters also will select governors in a second-round runoff.
Until 1996, Brazilians used paper ballots, which were counted by hand. Election results often took a week or more, as ballots came in by canoe and horseback from remote Amazon villages.
Fraud also was widespread, but the machines have reduced that problem with encrypted software and dedicated phone lines that transmit the data to a central counting site.
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