Bolsonaro urged foreign diplomats to question the elections in Brazil

BRAZIL, Brazil – The president Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil called dozens of foreign diplomats to the presidential palace on Monday to tell them he believed the country’s voting systems could be equippeda potential preview of his strategy for an election that is 75 days away and polls predict he will lose overwhelmingly.

Although Bolsonaro’s presentation was not new, he repeated those claims for years, your audience Yes it was.

He had invited officials from most of the embassies in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, raising their demands of a question of internal policy to foreign policy.

He had promised to share evidence showing fraud in the last two presidential elections, but much of his 47-minute presentation, which he broadcast to the public, focused on repeat the information of a hack by the Brazilian Electoral Agency in 2018, as well as its allegations. that some judges of the Supreme Court they were trying to sabotage his candidacy for re-election.

“I know you all want democratic stability in our country,” Bolsonaro told dozens of seated diplomats from behind a lectern.

“And this will only be achieved with transparent and reliable elections”.

Many diplomats present at the event have heard shocked for the presentation, including Bolsonaro’s suggestion that the way to ensure safe elections was through increased participation by the Brazilian armyaccording to two diplomats present at the event who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.

Those diplomats feared that Bolsonaro was laying the groundwork for an attempt to contest the results of the vote in the event of a defeat.

Less than three months before the presidential election, Bolsonaro appears to adhere to the former president’s plan Donald Trump.

Like Trump before the 2020 US election, Bolsonaro will go to the at the end of the polls.

And like Trump, Bolsonaro seemed to discredit the vote before it happened in an alleged attempt to increase accountability and transparency.

He also receives Bolsonaro trump aid and its allies in the form of endorsements, conservative political conferences, new social media, and ample television time from the talk show host. Fox NewsTucker Carlson.

The Brazilian president is among the populist leaders on the right and left who have questioned his country’s electoral systems.

include the president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador from Mexico, a leftist who tried to discredit his nation’s electoral body.

But Bolsonaro has publicly doubted the integrity of Brazil’s voting systems for years, even suggesting that there was fraud in the 2018 elections that led him to the presidency.

He declared, without clear evidence, that he would win a wider margin if there had been no fraud.

He extensively cited circumstantial evidence, such as videos that appear to show malfunctioning voting machines.

Many of those videos have been discredited by fact-checking agencies and electoral authorities.

On Monday, Bolsonaro again focused on a 2018 breach in which hackers had access to the internal systems of Brazilian electoral authorities for months.

Bolsonaro said the hack called into question the nation’s voting systems, but election officials dismissed his concerns.

He also claimed that the Brazilian federal police “claimed during the investigation that hackers could change the names of candidates, take a vote from one candidate and send it to the other.”

But the Brazilian electoral agency said it wasto false.

The agency said hackers, who gained access to the agency’s systems during the October 2018 election, were able to modify information on candidates and parties for a municipal elections of that year, but did not change the votes or interfere with electronic voting machines, which are not connected to the Internet.

The investigation also showed that the hackers had gained access to the source code of the machines and the personal data of the voters.

But the agency said the hackers were unable to access the voting machines or change the vote totals.

The agency, which reports to the same Supreme Court judges Bolsonaro says are politically aligned against him, has published a review of 20 points of Bolsonaro’s statements and sent it to diplomats after his speech.

The principal federal police investigator involved in the hack also testified before the Supreme Court that the investigation found no evidence of fraud during the 2018 election.

Diego Aranha, a Brazilian computer scientist who analyzed Brazil’s voting systems, said that while the hacking of 2018 showed that the country’s electoral security could be improved, it did not threaten the integrity of the election because the hackers weren’t been able to change the vote to vote or infiltrate voting machines.

Several embassies in Brasilia, including the US embassy, ​​declined to comment or did not respond to messages on Monday evening.

Pietro Lazzeri, Swiss ambassador to Brazil, said on Twitter:

We wish the Brazilian people that the next elections are another celebration of democracy and institutions“.

Officials from the United States and Europe have said they have faith in Brazilian electoral systems.

President Joe Biden he stressed the importance of respecting democratic institutions in his meeting with Bolsonaro in June.

At the conclusion of Bolsonaro’s speech on Monday, there was a brief silence as he stood in front of the audience.

Some of the cabinet members assembled by the president quickly broke into applause.

Many of the assorted diplomats also cheered politely.

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