The head of Brazil’s electoral authority on Wednesday rejected a request from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s political party to annul ballots cast on most electronic voting machines in the Oct. 30 presidential election that it said would have overturned its result.
Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes had previously issued a ruling that implicitly raised the possibility that Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party could suffer from such a challenge.
He conditioned analysis of the request on the presentation of an amended report to include results from the first electoral round on Oct. 2, in which the party won more seats in both congressional houses than any other, and he established a 24-hour deadline.
Photo: AFP
Earlier on Wednesday, Liberal Party President Valdemar Costa and lawyer Marcelo de Bessa held a news conference and said there would be no amended report.
“The complete bad faith of the plaintiff’s bizarre and illicit request ... was proven, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and the total absence of any evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narrative of the facts,” De Moraes wrote in his decision hours later.
He also ordered the suspension of government funds for the Liberal Party’s coalition until a fine of 23 million reais (US$4.29 million) for bad faith litigation is paid.
Photo: REUTERS
On Tuesday, De Bessa filed a 33-page request on behalf of Bolsonaro and Costa citing a software bug in the majority of Brazil’s machines — they lack individual identification numbers in their internal logs — to argue that all votes they recorded should be nullified.
De Bessa said that doing so would leave Bolsonaro with 51 percent of the remaining valid votes.
Neither Costa nor De Bessa have explained how the bug might have affected election results.
Independent experts consulted by The Associated Press said that, while newly discovered, it does not affect reliability and each voting machine is still readily identifiable through other means.
In his ruling, De Moraes noted the same.
He also wrote that the challenge to the vote appeared aimed at incentivizing anti-democratic protest movements and creating tumult, and ordered the investigation of Costa and the consultant hired to conduct an evaluation.
“De Moraes’ message to the political establishment is: The game is over. Questioning the result of the elections is not fair play, and people and institutions who do that will be punished harshly,” said Mauricio Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.
In the news conference on Wednesday, Costa said his intention is merely to prevent the results of the vote from haunting Brazil into the future.
The electoral authority on Oct. 30 ratified the victory of Bolsonaro’s nemesis, leftist former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and even many of the president’s allies quickly accepted the results.
Protesters in cities across the country have steadfastly refused to do the same, particularly with Bolsonaro declining to concede.
Bolsonaro spent more than a year claiming Brazil’s electronic voting system is prone to fraud, without ever presenting evidence.
The South American nation 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.
However, Brazil’s system has been closely scrutinized by domestic and international experts, who have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the