Politics

Bolsonaro’s party went head-on into putschist tactics. Electoral courts reacted

The Liberal Party has formally challenged the runoff results based on unbacked claims about voting machines. Brazil's chief electoral justice responded swiftly

Bolsonaro's party launched head-on into putschist tactics. Electoral courts reacted
Valdemar Costa Neto, chairman of the Liberal Party. Photo: Pedro Ladeira/Folhapress

The coalition for which President Jair Bolsonaro ran for re-election has formally challenged the integrity of the 2022 presidential elections, issuing a petition to nullify tens of millions of votes cast during the October 30 runoff, won by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The challenge, based on an unsubstantiated claim that older voting machines are susceptible to tampering, met with a swift reaction from Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s chief electoral justice.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s campaign requested to annul all votes cast in older models of electronic voting machines, which correspond to roughly 60 percent of all hardware used in this year’s election.

Brazil uses about half a million electronic voting machines to serve over 156 million eligible voters. They are periodically and gradually replaced at each election cycle. This year, six generations of machines were used at the same time.

As The Brazilian Report showed, a phony investigation commissioned by Mr. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party supposedly found that almost 280,000 older electronic voting machines did not function correctly, making it impossible for electoral systems to properly identify them. If the older machines were discarded, Mr. Bolsonaro would have been re-elected with “51.05 percent of the valid votes,” the court filing claims.

Separate audits by both the Federal Accounts Court and the Armed Forces found no evidence of fraud in this year’s elections or discrepancies between printed vote receipts with the tallies obtained from each machine and official results published online.

The petition echoes a conspiracy theory that circulated...

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