Análise de propostas de alteração do sistema eleitoral brasileiro: voto distrital, voto preferencial e voto impresso

Abstract

Undemocratic attacks can be carried out by elected officials themselves, through changes to democratic rules, which are approved by the legislature and accepted by the courts. The first sign that one of such attacks is underway is when changes are proposed under the allegation that the current rules are illegitimate. In Brazil, a changing proposal to the electoral system that has been under discussion in Congress for a long time is the replacement of the open-list proportional system used in legislative elections by a majority system, the so-called simple-plurality voting. Another more recent one is the replacement of the runoff system used in presidential elections by a single round system in which voters rank their candidates in a sequence and their votes can be transferred from one candidate to another when the most preferred cannot be elected: the ranked-choice voting. Also, the current President has publicly contested the tallying model of the elections, which is fully digital, and suggested he may not accept the results of the 2022 elections if ballots are not printed by the voting machines. This is another proposal that has been processed in the Congress for a long time. It was necessary, therefore, to analyze these three proposals through the lens of social choice theory. After studying some electoral systems currently in use by democracies around the world, the simple-plurality voting proved to be the most harmful of the three proposals, as it sacrifices the proportionality of parliamentary representation in favor of governability. The ranked-choice voting is still poorly understood by parliamentarians, which shows that its difficulty can be an obstacle to its adoption, but its implementation could be beneficial, in the sense that it would reduce the incentives for the strategic voting. Finally, printing ballots proved to be unnecessary, given the security mechanisms that already exist in electronic voting machines, not to mention its high cost of implementation. However, the decision should be up to Congress. The laws already declared unconstitutional by the supreme court were more for technical reasons than for the unconstitutionality of printing ballot itself.