BRASILIA. “Printed and verifiable vote”, is written in Portuguese with the colors of Brazil on the placards of the demonstrators who in recent days have gathered in all the squares of the country to support the president, Jair Bolsonaro, in its war against the electronic voting system in elections. After accusing him of generating “fraud” for years, the president ignored the national electoral court’s deadline to present evidence of his claims. Therefore, the Superior Electoral Court of Brazil has asked the Supreme Court to investigate Bolsonaro for the defamation campaign and the various attacks on democratic institutions through social networks.
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According to the president, Brazil’s electronic voting system is unreliable and makes it impossible to verify the results. For this reason, he argues for a constitutional amendment that makes a printed receipt of each vote visible to the voter before being deposited in a sealed container for later review if necessary. Last week live on his social channels, he showed a video that tracks the votes of the 2014 presidential elections and which, according to Bolsonaro, were rigged.
“There is no way to prove that there was or was not fraud in the election. But there are several indications that reveal these crimes,” he told his audience during the nearly three-hour presentation. In which he took the opportunity to attack the likely opponent in next year’s elections: the former president Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva. But according to two Bolsonaro ministers, who spoke to the news agency Associated Press provided he remains anonymous, his administration has found no evidence of electoral fraud in the past 25 years.
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The electoral court rejected the claims of the incumbent president as unfounded, stating that the system is reliable and that there are several means of verifying the results. The president of the court,Luis Roberto Barroso, said ad AP that the proposed reform would be a risky solution to a nonexistent problem, creating more opportunities for vote buying. Jair Bolsonaro, now down in the polls ahead of his re-election in 2022, could follow the example of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, in inciting his supporters to contest the vote in the event of his possible defeat. But the electoral authorities have already moved to prevent the president from undermining the confidence of citizens in the upcoming elections.
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