Taking Trump's cue, Bolsonaro launches fraud claims
Brazil’s presidential election is 15 months away, yet barely a day passes without President Jair Bolsonaro raising the specter of fraud and warning that he will be entitled to reject the results unless Congress overhauls the voting system.
The relentless attack on Brazil’s electronic voting system has prompted an outcry and closed-door meetings between lawmakers and Supreme Court justices to defend the system. And the nation’s electoral tribunal last month ordered the president to provide proof of the fraud he has repeatedly claimed to possess.
The assault raises concern that Bolsonaro, far behind in early polls, is cribbing from former US President Donald Trump and laying the groundwork for his own version of the January 6 Capitol riot in Washington.
“His strategy seems to be that if he can cloud the results of the election by claiming it is fraudulent or rigged, then he has a better chance of overturning the results,” said Robert Kaufman, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.
At Bolsonaro’s order, his administration has tasked the federal police with scouring Brazil’s states for reports of fraud from the past 25 years he can use to support his claims, according to one of his ministers, who spoke on condition of anonymity. It is also part of his strategic response to opponents of a constitutional reform proposal that would add printouts of each vote to the electronic system, the minister said.
Were the proposal implemented, a receipt for each electronic vote would be visible to the voter before being deposited into a sealed box. In the event of alleged irregularities with the electronic vote, the president argues, results could be checked by manually counting printouts.
Opponents of the proposal, including the current and future presidents of the electoral tri- bunal, all three of whom are also Supreme Court justices, say the electronic system that began taking shape in 1996 already allows for an audit and that the change would merely open the way for baseless fraud claims. Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes, a former president of the electoral tribunal, said by phone that the current moment calls for caution. “People close to the government have used as an argument that, if it isn’t their way, there can’t be an election,” Mendes said. “It became a topic to cultivate crisis. We saw what happened in the United States.”
In recent weeks, the far-right president has ratcheted up the frequency and intensity of his comments.
“Either we do clean elections in Brazil or we don’t do elections at all,” he told supporters on July 8.
On Friday, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, said elections were “nonnegotiable” and that anyone who attempts to take a step backward “will be singled out by the people and history as the enemy of the nation.”
The escalation coincides with record-low approval ratings for Bolsonaro, street protests against him, mounting pressure from a parliamentary inquiry into his administration’s handling of the pandemic and allegations of corruption in the acquisition of vaccines.