Bolsonaro party fined for poll test

BRASÍLIA: Brazil’s top electoral authority on Wednesday threw out a challenge by President Jair Bolsonaro’s party against his election defeat and fined it more than US$4 million (143 million baht) for bringing the case “in bad faith”.

The head of the Superior Electoral Tribunal, judge Alexandre de Moraes, ruled the far-right president’s Liberal Party had presented “absolutely false” arguments in its case, which he said was aimed at “encouraging criminal and anti-democratic movements” by Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters seeking to fight the election result.

The Liberal Party (PL) brought the case Tuesday, saying an auditing firm it hired had found “irreparable operating discrepancies” in around 280,000 electronic voting machines used in the Oct 30 runoff election, which Mr Bolsonaro lost to veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The PL called for electoral authorities to exclude all votes cast on five models of voting machine manufactured before 2020, alleging they gave a suspiciously large advantage of nearly five percentage points to Mr Lula.

Party lawyer Marcelo Bessa said excluding those votes would change the election result, from a 1.8-percentagepoint win for Mr Lula to a 2.1-percentage-point win for Mr Bolsonaro.

Mr Moraes responded with a withering rejection, accusing the PL of seeking to fuel ongoing protests by Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters, who have blocked highways and rallied outside army barracks calling for a military intervention to keep the incumbent in power.

“There is a total lack of supporting evidence” in the PL’s claim, Mr Moraes said in a statement.

The case “is blatantly offensive to the democratic rule of law, and was brought recklessly, for the purpose of encouraging criminal and anti-democratic movements ... responsible for grave threats and violence”, Mr Moraes added.