Bolsonaro challenges election result
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is contesting his defeat in the October election and calling on the electoral authority to annul votes cast on most of the nation’s electronic voting machines, citing a software bug that independent experts have said didn’t affect the reliability of results.
Such an action would leave Bolsonaro with 51 per cent of the remaining valid votes — and a reelection victory, according to Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party.
The electoral authority has already declared victory for leftist former President Luiz Ina´cio Lula da Silva, and leading politicians, including many of the president’s allies, have accepted the results. Protesters in cities across the country have steadfastly refused to do the same, particularly with Bolsonaro declining to concede.
Party leader Valdemar Costa and an auditor hired by the party told reporters in Brasilia that their evaluation found all machines dating from before 2020 — nearly 280,000 of them, or about 59 per cent of the total used in the October 30 runoff — lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs. Neither explained how that might have affected election results, but said they were asking the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines. The complaint characterised the bug as “irreparable non-compliance due to malfunction” that called into question the authenticity of the results.
Immediately afterward, Alexandre de Moraes, who presides over the electoral authority, said the court would not consider the complaint unless the party offers a new report within 24 hours that would include results from the first electoral round on October 2, in which the Liberal Party won more seats in both congressional houses than any other.
The bug hadn’t been known previously, yet experts said it also doesn’t affect results. Each voting machine can still be easily identified through other means, like its city and voting district, according to Wilson Ruggiero, a professor of computer engineering and digital systems at the Polytechnic School of the University of Sao Paulo.
Diego Aranha, an associate professor of systems security at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has participated in official security tests of Brazil’s electoral system, agreed.
“It does not undermine the reliability or credibility in any way,” Ruggiero said. “The key point that guarantees correctness is the digital signature associated with each voting machine.”
While
the machines don’t have individual identification numbers in their internal logs, those numbers do appear on printed receipts that show the sum of all votes cast for each candidate, said Aranha, adding the bug was only detected due to the efforts by the electoral authority to provide greater transparency.
Bolsonaro’s less than two-point loss to da Silva on October 30 was the narrowest margin since Brazil’s 1985 return to democracy. While the president hasn’t explicitly cried foul, he has refused to concede defeat or congratulate his opponent — leaving room for supporters to draw their own conclusions.
Many have been protesting relentlessly, making claims of election fraud and demanding that the armed forces intervene.
Dozens of Bolsonaro supporters gathered outside the news conference yesterday, decked out in the green and yellow of Brazil’s flag and chanting patriotic songs.
Bolsonaro spent more than a year claiming Brazil’s electronic voting system is prone to fraud, without ever presenting evidence.
Brazil began using an electronic voting system in 1996 and election security experts consider such systems less secure than hand-marked paper ballots, because they leave no auditable paper trail. But Brazil’s system has been closely scrutinised by domestic and international experts who have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud.
—AP