Car batteries power the vote in Brazil elections

Car batteries power the vote in Brazil elections
By Elizabeth Nash
07 October 2002

Car batteries were used to power electronic polling booths in far-flung Brazilian rainforests yesterday in presidential elections expected to make the charismatic former lathe operator Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva the country's first working-class head of state.

For the first time, more than 115 million voters in Latin America's biggest and most populous country voted, not with ballot papers, but by calling up their chosen candidate on a screen and punching their preference into a keyboard.

The results from each of the 406,000 polling machines ­ described as a sort of electoral microwave ­ were recorded on disk and taken to local scrutineers. What is claimed to be the world's biggest electronic poll in a country where voting is compulsory was designed to reduce fraud and speed up the count. Crossing a nation more vast than the US, results were expected early this morning, within hours of polls closing.

Exit polls showed Mr da Silva just short of an outright victory with 49 per cent of the vote, compared with 20 per cent for Jose Serra, a former health minister, and 17 per cent for Anthony Garotinho, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro state. Mr da Silva needs 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a runoff against the second-place contender.

Distances meant the election campaign was conducted predominantly on television, a medium where Mr da Silva, 56, proved authoritative as he conveyed his compassionate but moderate message of "peace and love".

Once a trade union firebrand, Mr da Silva softened the programme of his Workers' Party (PT) and smartened his tailoring for his fourth attempt at the presidency. The words "class struggle" now absent from his vocabulary, he urged Brazilians to vote for "change".

Poverty and unemployment have made soaring violence a deep concern. In the second-largest city of Rio de Janeiro, 40,000 soldiers and police patrolled the streets to protect voters after drug lords caused disruption last week and threatened to prevent millions of slum-dwellers from voting.

Investors and financiers in Europe and the United States are nervous at the biggest advance of the left in Latin America since the victory of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970.