Jair Bolsonaro filed a lawsuit against electronic ballot boxes

The current President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, filed a complaint with Brazil’s highest electoral court on November 22 about the results of the October 30 vote, CNN Brasil reports. Bolsonaro on that day in the second round lost to the candidate of the Socialist Workers’ Party Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, who led the country in 2003-2010, with a narrow margin: 50.9% against 49.1%. In absolute terms, Lula da Silva’s advantage over Bolsonaro was 2.14 million votes. The complaint of the losing candidate to the highest electoral court of Brazil was joined by the chairman of the liberal party that nominated Bolsonaro, Valdemar Costa Neto. They claim that five types of electronic ballot boxes during the second round on October 30 were subject to “irreparable malfunctions”, which made their use illegal.

Bolsonaro’s supporters hired an independent expert organization, Voto Legal, to audit the election results, lawyer Anton Timchenko notes, according to the results of the study, it was found that all electronic ballot boxes made before 2020, instead of a unique identification number assigned to each machine to control the correctness of its work, reflect the same combination of numbers for all – 67305985. On this basis, the Bolsonarists demand to annul the votes of voters who voted in the second round with these 279,336 electronic ballot boxes. If this requirement is satisfied, then the outgoing president will be recognized as the winner of the elections with a result of 51.05%, the expert notes.

True, Timchenko says, Bolsonaro had previously been a member of parliament seven times and had no complaints about electronic voting, which has been used since 2000 in Brazilian elections. “The system of electronic ballot boxes, a subject of national pride for Brazilians, has been recognized by various political forces in the country, the reliability of the mechanism has been repeatedly confirmed both by external audits and international experts. The military, which Bolsonaro initiated to oversee that there were no violations, has already published a report indicating that they do not have evidence of any falsification, ”he says. And although the mentioned bug exists, it does not interfere with establishing a specific polling station where the voter voted.

The fact that Bolsonaro will not be able to appeal the election results after their results were simultaneously approved by both the highest electoral court of Brazil and the military, who were ordered by the president to conduct a parallel count of the voting results, is also said by Lyudmila Okuneva, head of the Department of History and Politics of Europe and America at MGIMO. “Lula definitely won. Bolsonaro has no chance of contesting the results. There is no street confrontation as such now, but there are separate protests and may continue further. True, these protests have no chance either,” Okuneva said. Bolsonaro has no great prospects for challenging the results of the second round, Viktor Kheyfets, professor at the Faculty of International Relations at St Petersburg University, agrees: “Brazilians are proud of their electronic voting system, which has proven itself very well over the long years of its existence.”

To win, Bolsonaro will need to prove that due to her incorrect work, he lost at least 2 million votes, Heifetz notes. Timchenko says that the Bolsonarists are driving themselves into a trap in this way. The President of the Supreme Electoral Court, Alexandre de Moraes, ruled that the lawsuit should concern not only the votes in the second round of elections, but also in the first – after all, the same electronic ballot boxes were used both times.

“A revision of the results of the first round would jeopardize the 99 seats in the Chamber of Deputies that the Bolsonarists won in the general elections (when the vote was not only for the president, but also for the deputies of parliament and senators. – Vedomosti) – the best result for the whole their history,” says Timchenko. In addition, according to CNN Brasil, the highest electoral court is headed by opponents of the outgoing head of state, so the outcome of the lawsuit is most likely a foregone conclusion.