BRAZIL: The attempt by the party of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro to have the results of the run-off election he lost in October overturned by the head of Brazil’s electoral court.
The parties in Bolsonaro’s alliance were also penalised by Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court with 22.9 million reais ($4.3 million) for engaging in what the court deemed to be bad faith litigation.
Bolsonaro contested the results of the Brazilian presidential election, which he lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month, claiming some votes from certain machines should be thrown out.
His group said that after conducting an audit of the Bolsonaro and Lula second-round runoff on October 30, it discovered “evidence of catastrophic malfunction” in several electronic voting devices.
De Moraes had previously ruled that Bolsonaro’s party may suffer if it raised the issue and had asked for more information, which the party declined to offer.
In a 33-page request submitted on Tuesday, party attorneys argued that all votes recorded by the machines should be thrown out due to a software flaw in the majority of Brazil’s voting machines, which lack unique identification numbers in their internal logs.
The impact of the bug on the outcome of the election was not addressed by Costa or de Bessa.
Independent specialists interviewed by the Associated Press stated that even if the information was recent, reliability was unaffected and each voting machine could still be identified using other methods. De Moraes underlined the same in his decision on Thursday.
He also demanded a probe into Valdemar Costa, the head of Bolsonaro’s party, writing that it appeared the challenge to the result was intended to stir up commotion and encourage anti-democratic protest activities.
On Wednesday, Costa claimed that his main goal was to prevent Brazil’s future problems from being caused by the outcome of the 2022 election.
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