Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court hosted a delegation of 30 digital influencers this Thursday in the latest step of its communication strategy to defend Brazil’s electronic voting system.
Electoral integrity has been a prime target of disinformation spread by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters since at least 2018, before he was elected head of state.
A few days before the election, the then-candidate said he would not accept a loss. When results showed that he would face Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad in a runoff, he falsely claimed that fraud blocked him from winning in the first round.
Once in office, Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters stepped up their attacks on the electoral system.
In 2021, Mr. Bolsonaro hosted the press at his official residence under the pretense of showing evidence of electoral fraud. He came up short, and in fact admitted: “We have no evidence”.
This disinformation campaign was waged parallel to an effort to approve a constitutional amendment that would reintroduce printed vote receipts to the Brazilian electoral system.
In 2002, approximately 6 percent of voters used voting machines that printed receipts, but the electoral authority deemed the experiment a failure, largely due to printer crashes and delays. Congress approved the reinstatement of printed ballots on two further occasions, in...