Bolsonaro campaign working on a Brazilian ‘Big Lie’

In the aftermath of his electoral defeat in 2020, former U.S. President Donald Trump spent months hammering home a fraudulent narrative that the vote was rigged in favor of his opponent, Joe Biden.

In what he began calling “The Big Lie,” Mr. Trump spread a series of wild claims that voter fraud took place during the 2020 election and robbed him of victory in a number of key states. In Georgia, he alleged that “suitcases” of Republican ballots were not counted; in Michigan, he said dead people voted for the Democrats. All of these claims have since been disproven.

In Brazil, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro spent most of his term in office calling into question the legitimacy of the country’s electronic voting system. Now, facing the possibility of losing to his leftist nemesis, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in Sunday’s presidential runoff, he is seeking to spin a Big Lie of his own.

On Monday, Mr. Bolsonaro’s Communications Minister Fábio Faria called an impromptu press conference to claim that several radio stations — most notably in states of Brazil’s largely pro-Lula Northeast — aired roughly 18 percent fewer ads from the Bolsonaro campaign than from his opponent, even though candidates are legally entitled to the same airtime during the runoff stage.

A complaint to electoral courts was quickly dismissed by Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s chief electoral judge, who told the Bolsonaro campaign to provide more evidence in up to 24 hours.

The president’s campaign replied on Tuesday that a sample of the programming of eight radio stations in two northeastern states showed that they had collectively aired 1,835 ads for the Lula campaign between October 7 and 14, about 66 percent more than the 1,105 ads for Mr. Bolsonaro’s re-election campaign.

The petition includes a broken Google Drive link, which supposedly contained audio files backing up their claims.

A slew of inconsistencies and disproofs have since surfaced, but Mr. Bolsonaro declared on Wednesday that their complaints are “not over yet” and that he would go “all the way, within the Constitution” to appeal the decision. “This obviously interferes with the final vote tally,” he said, from the presidential residence. Some of his allies in Congress have even called for Sunday’s election to be postponed.

Inconsistencies appear

Among the radio stations listed by the Bolsonaro campaign as having violated electoral parity is Rádio Bispa, headquartered in the northeastern city of Recife and identified in...