When safeguards become trust: citizen confidence in Brazil’s electronic voting machines

Brazil constitutes an important case for comparative study of trust in voting technology: a compulsory electorate of over 150 million has voted through electronic voting machines (EVMs) introduced in 1996 and universal since 2000, amid partisan contestation in 2018 and 2022. Covariance-based structural equation modeling of a 415-voter Brazilian survey tests a model in which structural assurance (SA) drives a second-order Trust construct shaping attitudes toward paper ballots (substitution), EVMs (direct affirmation), and internet voting (trust-transfer spillover). SA and Trust prove statistically distinct yet converge to near-unity, motivating a domain-bounded theoretical extension, termed the institutional dissolution of trust: in mature, comprehensively scaled, mandatory regimes, structural assurance and trusting beliefs form a unified judgment. Downstream mechanisms operate as theorized, with attenuated spillover. A secondary test of the distinction between initial trust formation and recurrent trust maintenance shows that pre-1996 paper-ballot experience has no effect on EVM trust, robust to within-cohort age decomposition and engagement controls, whereas problems experienced while voting accompany lower trust and assurance. The evidence validates that distinction and the sociotechnical premise that technological trustworthiness matters but cannot alone secure trust, and positions Brazil as informative for comparative scholarship on long-running e-voting regimes.