THIS IS AN EMERGENCY BULLETIN: A foreign country has counted its votes on the same night it held its election. Officials across the United States are urged to remain calm and keep doing absolutely nothing with the speed and dignity they're known for.

Here are the verified facts, delivered at full siren. About 125 million Brazilians voted Oct. 4 on machines that print no paper ballots. Less than four hours after polls closed, according to Fox News Digital, the country knew its presidential race was headed to a runoff between conservative challenger Flavio Bolsonaro and leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

FOUR HOURS. Repeat: FOUR HOURS. In some American counties, that's how long it takes to find the key to the room where the ballots are kept.

The situation is escalating. Brazil used 499,248 voting machines on Election Day. Not one of them connected to the internet. Each one prints its own receipt of the results.

Last December, Brazil invited a record 149 outsiders to try to break the system. Evaluators concluded nothing they found could alter results or reveal how anyone voted. In America, we invite outsiders too. We call them "lawyers," and they bill hourly.

Nearly nine in 10 Brazilian voters unlock the machine with a fingerprint. The country's electoral court says there's been no proven fraud since the machines debuted in 1996. Every machine prints its tally at closing and posts it in front of the polling place.

AUTHORITIES ARE NOW TRACKING A CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT. Brazil does all this while Americans are still being told that asking for an ID is too much to bear. Brazil asks for your actual finger. Nobody faints.

We go live now to the scene of the true crisis: a regional American counting center, where a made-up election supervisor named Doreen has been searching for the box cutter since Tuesday. "We had it," Doreen told no one, because she is fictional. "It was right here by the provisional envelopes." Officials say the scissors could be recovered by Thanksgiving. Some fear Easter.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL, EXCEPT FOR THE PART WHERE IT IS. Brazil's system runs on paperless machines, which plenty of American conservatives distrust, and fingerprint ID, which plenty of American liberals would call a crisis. So everyone gets to be mad about something. That's the only American election tradition that's ever finished on time.

Meanwhile, you, the American voter, will stay up until 2 a.m. on Nov. 3 refreshing a map, then wake up to a man on cable saying "too early to call" in front of a touchscreen that cost more than your house. Brazil was asleep by midnight.

Stay tuned to this station. Brazil counted 125 million votes in under four hours. We'll have an update on the scissors as soon as one becomes available.

This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.

The real story that inspired this