Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right politician, challenges his October election loss to left-wing rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva after weeks of silence.
Bolsonaro is now calling on the electoral authority to annul votes cast on most of Brazil's electronic voting machines. The former president cited a software bug that independent experts have said did not affect the reliability of the results.
Bolsonaro Challenges Election Results
The far-right politician's actions could leave him with 51% of the remaining valid votes, if his request is approved, giving him a re-election victory. Bolsonaro's request, which was filed by his lawyer, Marcelo de Bessa, comes as the electoral authority has already declared Lula da Silva as the victor of the race.
It also comes as leading politicians, including many of the president's allies, have also accepted the results of the presidential election. However, many protesters in many cities across Brazil have held on and refused to do the same, particularly with the former president declining to concede the race, as per Politico.
Valdemar Costa, the party leader, along with an auditor that the party hired, said that an evaluation discovered that all machines dating from before 2020, which totals nearly 59% of all machines used in the Oct. 30 runoff, lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.
However, they did not explain how that issue with the machines could have affected the results of the elections. On the other hand, they said that they were asking the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines.
According to Inquirer, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is currently leading the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), said in a ruling that the former president's right-wing electoral coalition is required to present its full audit for both rounds of the vote held last month within 24 hours, or else he would reject it.
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Highly Unlikely to Work
The country's currency, following news of the electoral complaint, deepened its losses, closing 1.3% weaker against the US dollar. Prior to this, the currency was already suffering from investor concerns regarding Lula da Silva's spending plans and economic policymakers.
The head of operations at FB Capital, Fernando Bergallo, was one of many who said that Bolsonaro's attempt to challenge the election results would not get far. However, he added that it would add to "pessimism on top of everything that we already have.
The president of Lula's Workers Party (PT), Gleisi Hoffmann, described the former president's attempts as "chicanery." She argued that the election was decided in the vote and noted that the country needs peace to build a better future. The Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) also called Bolsonaro's challenge "senseless," saying that it would be resisted by institutions, the international community, and Brazilian society.
The former president's complaint wrote that there were signs of serious failures that generate uncertainties in the election results and that they made it impossible to validate the results generated. The move could potentially galvanize supporters of the president, whose anti-democratic rhetoric has sparked fears that he could continue to disrupt the peaceful transition of power for Brazil's presidency, Al Jazeera reported.
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