Technical problems in the artificial intelligence (AI) component of a supercomputer set-up provided by Oracle prompted delays in the processing of votes during the first round of municipal elections in Brazil last weekend, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE, in the Portuguese acronym), has said.
In 2020, for the first time, the TSE centralized countrywide totalization of votes on a supercomputer using database platforms with artificial intelligence technology provided by Oracle. Previously, each of the 27 regional electoral courts across all the Brazilian states counted the votes and forwarded them over to the TSE.
The problems in the equipment during the elections on Sunday (15) meant the process of vote processing suffered a delay of nearly three hours. Brazil is one of the only countries in the world where the voting process is entirely electronic. The system that includes an estate of about 455,000 voting machines enables results to be processed within a matter of minutes within the closing of ballots.
The service provided by Oracle to the Brazilian electoral authorities consists of two sets of hardware, as well as a cloud-enabled high-performance database and storage servers. As part of the contract, the vendors provide the TSE with a main Exadata X8 Full Rack server, with eight processing nodes, and an Exadata X8 Half Rack, with four processing nodes, for redundancy.
During the vote processing exercise on Sunday, one of the eight processing nodes of the main server was disconnected. Whereas the delay in counting the votes had been initially attributed to this glitch and the IT team at the TSE had been focused on solving the issue, it was later found that the equipment was able to automatically distribute the load to the other processing nodes.
While the node failure is not linked to a direct