POLITICSBRAZIL
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro challenges election result
39 minutes ago39 minutes ago
Three weeks after losing Brazil’s election by the narrowest margin seen in decades, outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro has filled a long-shot appeal claiming votes should be thrown out due to faulty voting machines.
https://p.dw.com/p/4JvS1
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro filed a 33-page formal appeal with Brazil’s election authority, blaming the lost election on software bugs and demanding that votes cast on majority of the nation’s electronic machines be annulled.
The complaint characterized the bug as “irreparable non-compliance due to malfunction” and called into question the authenticity of the results.
“We always distrusted these machines. … We want a massive audit,” the outgoing president’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, had said last week.
The Liberal Party claimed that 280,000 of voting machines lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs. However, the complaint did not specify what this meant for the results.
“The inconsistencies do not allow the voter’s vote to be verified. This does not mean that there was fraud, but rather that there is no certainty that the ballot boxes are credible,” Marcelo Bessa, a lawyer for the Liberal Party, told reporters in Brasilia.
The challenge comes three weeks after left-wing political heavyweight Lula da Silva won the election over Bolsonaro by the narrowest margin seen since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985.
What are Bolsonaro’s chances?
Bolsonaro has not explicitly conceded the election, which has fueled protests by his supporters across Brazil in the weeks following the vote.
However, political analysts say Bolsonaro’s move is unlikely to get him the presidency, as Brazil’s election authority has already formally acknowledged da Silva as the victor. Many of the president’s political allies have also accepted the election results.
Da Silva is set to take office on January 1, 2023.
Independent experts told the Associated Press that that the glitch will not have affected the results and that all machines can still be identified through other means.
Alexandre de Moraes, head of Brazil’s electoral authority, responded to the request by questioning whether the voting machines in question were used in both the run-off, as well as for the first round of voting on October 2.
Moraes said the complaint would need to be amended within 24 hours to include the first round of voting, or else it would be thrown out.
mk/wmr (Reuters, dpa, AP)
