By KEVIN G. HALL
  Knight Ridder News Service

  RIO DE JANEIRO - If Tuesday's U.S. elections are again mired in technical mishaps, officials may want to learn from Brazil, where 90 million citizens recently voted with ease in the world's largest electronic election.

  Since 1996, Latin America's largest and most populous democracy has gradually moved toward electronic voting. On Wednesday, whether they were in the steamy Amazon or close to southernmost South America in Porto Alegre, Brazilians were able to cast their votes electronically in national elections.

  More than two million officials staffed polling stations across the nation and tallied the count without complaints of insufficient training or allegations of fraud. Results
  were tallied electronically minutes after polls closed, and 90 percent of the vote was calculated within a few hours.

  Only one percent of the electronic polling booths had problems, a number election officials said was much lower than with traditional printed ballots.

  On Tuesday, Florida, Maryland, Georgia and Texas will use electronic touch-screen computerized voting, and it's likely that other states will consider electronic voting, especially if it reduces the potential for error.

  Brazil's electronic voting system relied on technology developed by Unisys Corp. and National Semiconductor Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. Votes were cast on about 325,000 electronic machines, then encrypted and transmitted electronically over secure lines to Brazil's state capitals. From there, the votes were relayed electronically to tabulating machines in the country's capital of Brasilia for the final count.

  The Unisys machines resemble small bank-teller machines, with keyboards and small screens. When a voter punches in a designated number for a candidate, the
  candidate's face appears on the small screen, and the voter confirms or rejects the vote.

  During the first round of voting on Oct. 6, the electronic machines correctly tallied the results of races that involved 18,882 candidates seeking 1,655 elected offices on the state and federal level.

  ''It's not a joke to think you can calculate in less than 12 hours the count of 90 million votes without a problem,'' Nelson Jobim, the president of Brazil's Supreme Election Tribunal, said the day after the widely praised elections.

  The Brazilian model may not replicate easily in the United States.

  ''We don't have what you would call a U.S. system. We have 50 systems,'' said Bill Frenzel, a former U.S. congressman and visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank that supports election reform.

  The U.S. Constitution determines that states, not the federal government, are responsible for election rules.