Opposition demands answers and audit over e-vote in São Paulo council | OneFootball

A group of 51 São Paulo council members has formally filed a request seeking detailed clarifications and a broad audit of the electronic voting system used in the body’s internal deliberations. The document focuses strictly on the digital voting procedures of the Deliberative Council and is unrelated to the process by which council members are chosen in general assemblies, which takes place in parallel.

The target of the inquiry is the platform managed by Tafner Solutions, a company hired by the club to enable internal voting and host the institutional documents reviewed during the council’s meetings. According to the text of the request, doubts have arisen among the club’s lawmakers regarding the possibility of real-time vote monitoring and the level of access privileges granted to certain users registered on the platform.

The signatories stressed in the legal filing that the initiative is strictly “institutional, preventive, and oversight-oriented” in nature, emphasizing that the measure does not constitute a formal accusation of fraud or misconduct against the software provider, São Paulo’s executive board, or the leadership of the Deliberative Council.

Points of inquiry and information security

The request suggests that the Council’s president invite technical representatives from Tafner Solutions to provide clarifications before the plenary. The council members’ list of demands is centered on five structural pillars of digital security:

Ballot secrecy: Guarantee of inviolability and the technical impossibility of linking a council member’s identity to their respective choice in secret ballots;

Access profiles: Detailed mapping of which users have administrative or viewing permissions in the system;

Audit trails: Verification of the mechanisms that record modifications or access to the database;

Real-time monitoring: Clarification on whether or not there are tools that allow ongoing vote counts to be tracked before voting has concluded;

Preservation of evidence: Request for an immediate protective measure to safeguard logs, backup copies, and historical digital records since the platform was implemented at the club.

Contractual transparency and next steps

In addition to the software’s technical aspects, the group of council members is demanding full administrative transparency regarding the commercial relationship between São Paulo and the technology company. They have requested access to a full copy of the service agreement, including the financial amounts involved in the transaction, the documents that supported the hiring, and the governance protocols currently in force for overseeing the service.

If the request is approved by the body’s president, the technical and contractual materials gathered will be distributed to Council members so they can assess the need for additional measures. Among the group’s top alternatives are hiring an independent audit, conducting a specialized technical examination, or having the system validated by external digital certification bodies.

So far, the leadership of São Paulo’s Deliberative Council has not set an official deadline to issue an opinion on whether to accept or reject the request.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.