The head of Brazil’s electoral court has rejected the appeal from President Jair Bolsonaro’s political party to annul ballots cast on most electronic voting machines, which would have nullified the October 30 election.
On Tuesday, lawyer Marcelo de Bessa filed a 33-page request on behalf of Bolsonaro and Costa citing a software bug in the majority of Brazil’s machine. The machines lacked individual identification numbers in their internal logs so he laid out an argument that all votes they recorded should be nullified.
De Bessa said that doing so would leave Bolsonaro with 51% of the remaining valid votes.
Neither Costa nor de Bessa have explained how the bug might have affected election results. Independent experts disclosed that while newly discovered, it doesn’t affect reliability and each voting machine is still readily identifiable through other means.
Alexandre de Moraes noted the same in his ruling. He had issued a prior ruling that implicitly raised the possibility that Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party could suffer from such a challenge.
Alexandre de Moraes placed investigation of their petition on the condition that a presentation of an amended report be made to include results from the first electoral round, on October 2, 2022 in which the party won more seats in both congressional houses than any other, and he established a 24-hour deadline.
Earlier Wednesday, November 23, 2022, Party President Valdemar Costa and lawyer Marcelo de Bessa held a press conference and pronounced that there would be no amended report.
“The complete bad faith of the plaintiff’s bizarre and illicit request … was proven, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and the total absence of any evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narrative of the facts.”
Alexandre de Moraes
Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of government funds for the Liberal Party’s coalition until a fine of 23 million reais ($4.3 million) for bad faith litigation is paid.
He also wrote that the challenge to the vote seem to be aimed at incentivizing anti-democratic protest movements and creating tumult, and ordered the investigation of Costa and the consultant hired to conduct an evaluation.
In the press conference on Wednesday, Costa said his intention is merely to prevent the results of the 2022 vote from haunting Brazil into the future.
Lula’s Victory Ratified By Electoral Body
The electoral authority on October 30, 2022 ratified the victory of Bolsonaro’s opponent, leftist Former President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and even many of the president’s allies quickly accepted the results.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won with 50.9% to Mr Bolsonaro’s 49.1% votes.
Protesters in cities across the country have steadfastly refused to accept the results, particularly because Bolsonaro has not conceded to defeat.
Lula, who previously served as president from 2003 to 2010, is now 77 years old and will become the oldest person to assume the post.
His victory was a stunning comeback for a politician who could not run in the last presidential election in 2018 because he was in jail and barred from public office. His conviction for corruption was later annulled.
Bolsonaro spent more than a year claiming Brazil’s electronic voting system is prone to fraud without ever presenting evidence.
The South American nation began using an electronic voting system in 1996 and election security experts consider such systems less secure than hand-marked paper ballots, because they leave no auditable paper trail.
However, Brazil’s system has been closely scrutinized by domestic and international experts who have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud.
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