Members of Brazil’s military and electoral justice inspect the electronic voting system in Brasilia this Wednesday. Photo: AP
The Brazilian Armed Forces have launched a controversial “inspection” of the electronic ballot boxes that will be used in the presidential elections in October and which are the constant target of a campaign to discredit President Jair Bolsonaro.
The president spreads the idea that if he loses in those elections in which he seeks a second term, it would be for fraud. Some of his relatives have anticipated that he would not recognize the results if former Social Democratic president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who leads him in the polls, wins.
The inspection of the polls began to be carried out by a group of technicians from the Ministry of Defense at the headquarters of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) in Brasilia.
The technicians, dressed in plain clothes but with masks with military signs, devoted themselves to studying the source code of the polls, in a computer room of the electoral authority, in the presence of journalists.
The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, points against electronic voting. Photo: AFP
Without precedents
Ahead of the 2022 elections, the Electoral Court has allowed a large number of institutions to participate in the supervision of the organization of the elections and, for the first time in Democracy, the military has registered to supervise the organization of the elections.
President Bolsonaro, who has plagued his government with army officers, has for months been leading a campaign of criticism and discrediting the entire electoral system in a style very similar to that proposed during the last period of his term in office by the former president. Donald Trump, an ally of the Brazilian head of state.
As part of this campaign, the far-right leader has consistently questioned the safety of electronic ballot boxes, which have begun to be used in Brazil since 1996 without generating any suspicion or allegation of fraud.
The former captain of the Army Reserve organized a meeting with almost 40 foreign ambassadors at the headquarters of the Government on 18 July, with the aim of transmitting his “suspicious” around the voting system. In his statement, he offered no evidence of his allegations.
At that meeting he went so far as to suggest to the electoral authorities that they accept “the recommendations” of the Armed Forces so that, on election day, a parallel count takes place in the barracks.
Towels with images of Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro, rivals in the presidential elections in Brazil in October, in a club in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: AP
For analysts this is a measure that would have very serious consequences if the military count did not coincide with that of the electoral authorities.
Criticisms and refusals
Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting system sparked widespread rejection from many sectors, including business groups and bankers who supported his election in 2018. Last month in a public letter “In Defense of the Democratic State of Law”, launched on a platform of the State University of Sao Paulo, important figures they repudiated threats and innuendo against the electoral system.
Interestingly, the signatories of the document include key figures from the Brazilian establishment, such as bankers Roberto Setubal and Candido Brachel of Itau, Brazil’s largest private bank.
Bolsonaro tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce paper voting. His children, the three legislators of different levels, speculated that during the elections there was a crisis similar to the one carried out by former President Trump on January 6, 2021 with the taking of the Capitol to try to cancel the ratification of the president Joe Biden victory.
The gravity of things was denounced days ago in Washington by former President of the Higher Electoral Court, Nelson Fachin, where he warned that “even more serious events could occur in the elections than the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021”.
Source: EFE
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Source: Clarin
