David Biller and Carla Bridi
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is contesting his defeat in the October election and calling on the electoral authority to annul votes cast on most of the nation’s electronic voting machines, citing a software bug that independent experts have said didn’t affect the reliability of results.
Such an action would leave Bolsonaro with 51% of the remaining valid votes - and a reelection victory, Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party, told reporters on Tuesday.
The electoral authority has already declared victory for Bolsonaro’s nemesis, leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and leading politicians, including many of the president’s allies, have accepted the results. Protesters in cities across the country have steadfastly refused to do the same, particularly with Bolsonaro declining to concede.
Party leader Valdemar Costa and an auditor hired by the party told reporters in Brasilia that their evaluation found all machines dating from before 2020 - nearly 280,000 of them, or about 59% of the total used in the Oct. 30 runoff - lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.
Neither explained how that might have affected election results, but said they were asking the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines.
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