Three weeks after losing his re-election bid and unusually silent, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made it clear on Tuesday that he is reluctant to accept the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, through a lawsuit in which his party asks partially "invalidate" the election result due to an alleged software bug.
The lawsuit was filed by the Liberal Party (PL), which supported the candidacy of the far-right leader, and questions the 61% of the electronic ballot boxes used in the second round of the elections, held on October 30. If the electoral authority annulled the affected votes, it would be a victory for Bolsonaro, who would obtain 51% of the remaining valid votes, said the lawyer who submitted the 33-page request on behalf of the president.
According to the official result, Lula prevailed in that second round with 50.9%, compared to 49.1% obtained by Bolsonaro, in a process endorsed and recognized as transparent by all the national and international observer missions that participated.
The electoral authority has already declared the victory of the former left-wing president and even many of the president's allies have accepted the results. Protesters in cities across the country have adamantly refused to do the same, particularly as Bolsonaro refuses to budge.
The president of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Alexandre de Moraes, immediately responded to the PL's demand and said that it can only be analyzed if there are also doubts about the first round, held four weeks earlier. In that first round, the legislative elections were also held, in which the PL obtained 99 deputies, which will give it the first minority in the lower house starting next year.
The president of the PL, Valdemar Costa Neto, in an ambiguous statement, clarified that the report on which the demand is based "does not represent the party's opinion," but considered that "it must be analyzed" in order to "strengthen democracy." However, De Moraes clarified that the ballot boxes put under suspicion were used in both rounds, so he urged the PL to modify the demand also including the result of the first round and present it within 24 hours.
In the last twenty days, Bolsonaro has not been seen in public and has disappeared from his social networks, in which he was feverishly active, but although he has not publicly accepted his defeat, he has begun the transition process with the team designated by Lula. for that end. His seclusion in the official residence since his defeat has fueled speculation about whether he is despondent or plotting to cling to power.
However, the PL's demand was interpreted as a new attack against electronic ballot boxes, about which the far-right leader sows suspicions since Lula began to stand out in the polls, more than a year ago, without presenting evidence. The president's son, federal lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, reiterated that concern at a conference in Mexico last week. "We always mistrust these machines. ... We want a massive audit," said the young Bolsonaro.
The PL said it had commissioned an audit from a private company, which concluded that 61% of the 577,125 ballot boxes used in the second round of the elections, manufactured between 2009 and 2015, "cannot be audited", unlike others, 2020 model.
The engineer Carlos Rocha, responsible for the report, explained that there are "very strong indications of malfunction" in the old ballot boxes and that "a possible inspection, an extraordinary verification, in the face of an extraordinary event" should be carried out. The lawyer Marcelo Bessa added that "because of this technical report, the inconsistencies and the relevant data" that it presents, that formation asked the electoral authorities to "verify this possible malfunction." Neither explained how that might have affected the election results.
The PL's demand generated uproar in the camps that thousands of far-right activists have maintained for three weeks at the gates of dozens of barracks, demanding a coup that prevents Lula's inauguration on January 1.
The Workers' Party (PT), which led the electoral coalition led by Lula, rejected the action attempted by the PL and considered it a "ruse" that cannot prosper in the courts. "Bolsonaro's appeal to the TSE is a ruse that has to be sanctioned as a lawsuit in bad faith. Enough of malice, irresponsibility and insults to institutions and democracy," said the president of the PT, Gleisi Hoffmann, in a message posted on Twitter.
"The election was decided with the vote and Brazil needs peace to build a better future," added Hoffmann, one of the heads of the transition team appointed by Lula, who is recovering from minor throat surgery.
For his part, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, assured that the results of the elections are “unquestionable”.
