BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) – More than three weeks after a failed election bid, President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday blamed a computer problem and called on the electoral authority to cancel the elections. installed on most of Brazil’s electronic voting machines, although independent experts say the bug is not. ‘It does not affect the reliability of the results.
Actions like this leave Bolsonaro with 51% of valid votes remaining – and a re-election victory, Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who submitted the 33-page proposal for the president and his Liberal Party, in told reporters.
Voting has already resulted in a victory for Bolsonaro’s opponent, left-wing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and many of the president’s allies have accepted the results. Protesters in cities across the country have refused to do so, especially Bolsonaro’s refusal.
The leader of the Liberal Party Valdemar Costa and the auditor hired by the party told reporters in Brasilia that their review found all the machines from before 2020 – about 280,000 of them, approx. or to 59% of the total used in the flow of October 30 – without individual proof. numbers are in the internal lists.
They did not elaborate on how the election results would be affected, but said they are asking the electoral authority to cancel all votes cast on the machines.
The complaint said the bug was “unfixable due to poor performance” and questioned the reliability of the results.
Immediately after, the head of the electoral authority issued a decision that strengthened the strength of Bolsonaro’s own party to face this challenge.
Alexandre de Moraes said the court would not consider a complaint if the party submits a revised report within 24 hours of the results from the first round of voting on October 2, in which the Liberal Party has more seats in both houses of assembly than others. .
Creomar de Souza, political analyst of Dharma Political Risk and Strategy, said the wording of de Moraes’ decision indicates that the electoral court will reject the appeal.
The bug was previously unknown, but experts said it will not affect the results. Each voting machine can still be identified by other means, such as its city and voting district, said Wilson Ruggiero, a professor of computer engineering and digital systems at the University Polytechnic School. of Sao Paulo.
Diego Aranha, an associate professor of security systems at Aarhus University in Denmark, who participated in official security tests of Brazil’s electoral system, agreed.
“It doesn’t diminish the truth or the truth in any way,” Ruggiero told The Associated Press by phone. “The main principle that ensures accuracy is the digital signature attached to each voting machine.”
Although the machines do not have individually identifiable numbers in their internal catalogs, those numbers appear on printed receipts that show the total number of votes cast for each candidate, Aranha said. and said that the bug was discovered because of the power of the vote. power to provide full clarity.
Bolsonaro lost by less than two points to da Silva on October 30 by the narrowest margin since Brazil’s 1985 return to democracy. Although the president did not cry foul, he did not allow himself to be defeated or congratulate his opponent – leaving room for supporters to make their own decisions.
Many people are still protesting, calling for election fraud and calling for the military to intervene.
Many supporters of Bolsonaro gathered outside the news conference on Sunday, wearing the green and yellow colors of the Brazilian flag and singing patriotic songs. Some verbally attacked and shoved journalists trying to enter the venue.
Bolsonaro has been promoting Brazil’s electronic voting system for more than a year a tendency to deceive, without presenting evidence.
The president’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a state lawmaker, echoed that concern at a rally in Mexico last week.
“We still don’t trust these machines. … We want to check more,” said the younger Bolsonaro. “The evidence is strong enough to call for an investigation into Brazil’s election.”
Brazil began using an electronic voting system in 1996 and election security experts consider it less secure than hand-marked paper ballots, as it leaves no paper trail possible. inspection. But Brazil’s system has been scrutinized by domestic and international experts and no evidence has been found of it being used for fraud.
The president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, said on Tuesday evening that the results of the election were “inevitable.”
Bolsonaro has been virtually isolated in the official home since his fall on October 30, prompting widespread suspicion that he is depressed or plans to cling to power.
In an interview with the newspaper O Globo, Vice President Hamilton Mourão said that Bolsonaro does not have erysipelas, a skin disease on his legs that he says prevents the president from wearing pants.
For its review, the Liberal Party hired the Legal Voting Group, a group that opposes the current system, saying it violates the law by not providing a digital record of every individual vote.
In a separate report released earlier this monthBrazil’s military said there were flaws in the country’s electoral system and proposed reforms, but did not confirm the fraud claims of some of Bolsonaro’s supporters.
Analysts said the military, a key part of Bolsonaro’s administration, may have maintained a sense of uncertainty over the issue to avoid upsetting the president. In a later statement, the Ministry of Defense said that although it found no evidence of fraud in the election statistics, that possibility could not be ruled out.
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Biller spoke from Rio de Janeiro. Associated Press reporter Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.
