Jair Bolsonaro’s attack on electronic voting takes another hit on the first day of the campaign

It took just one day of campaigning in Brazil to leave President Jair Bolsonaro totally isolated in the stubborn campaign to discredit the electronic vote he has been waging for months with his far-right groups.

Bolsonaro’s harsh attack on electronic ballot boxes that Brazil adopted in 1996 dates back to last year, when polls ahead of next October’s elections began to show how clearly preferred former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his greatest political antagonist.

But that attack seemed to be definitively wrecked after a ceremony of high political symbolism held on Tuesday evening at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which also coincided with the start of the electoral campaign.

In the act, Judge Alexandre de Moraes assumed the presidency of that body with a fervent defense of the electronic voting system that Bolsonaro considers fraudulent, despite the fact that there has never been a single report of fraud since it was adopted.

“We are one of the largest democracies in the world in terms of popular vote, we are among the four largest democracies in the world, but we are the only democracy in the world that reveals the election results on the same day with agility, security, competition and transparency” , he has declared. Moraes.

The sentence was followed by a minute of applause from the authorities present, including the heads of parliament, members of the Supreme Court, 22 governors, fifty foreign ambassadors and four former presidents: Lula, Michel Temer, Dilma Rousseff and José Sarney.

Almost everyone applauded, the majority standing, except Bolsonaro, one of his sons, his wife Michelle, and some of his ministers, who listened to that ovation by sitting down and staring into space, according to images released by the TSE, which until showed the president clearly distraught and yawning.

Luna’s reaction

Lula, a candidate of a broad progressive front, already in the middle of the campaign and with the intention of voting around 45% compared to the 30% attributed to Bolsonaro, has not given up on that scene.

“Bolsonaro was very uncomfortable because he heard the word democracy so many times, so much criticism of authoritarianism, so much criticism of ‘fake news’, that he was very uncomfortable,” he said in an interview on local radio Wednesday.

Many of the ambassadors who joined in those cheers had been on July 18 at a meeting called by Bolsonaro at his official residence with the sole purpose of “informing” them of the alleged lack of transparency of electronic ballot boxes.

“The ceremony at the TSE showed that Brazilian institutions are strong and trust the voting system,” one of those diplomats told EFE on Tuesday.

That same opinion has multiplied across almost the entire political spectrum of the country and has been expressed by well-known personalities, such as the President of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, who reiterated his “full confidence” in electoral justice and demanded “respect” from candidates.

Silence to the government

In Bolsonarism, on the other hand, there was absolute silence, despite the attacks on the electronic voting system having been one of its main flags in the last year.

This constant campaign has also generated complaints and investigations being processed in the courts against Bolsonaro himself and many far-right activists, formally accused of “attacks on democracy and its institutions”.

One of these investigations, underway in the Supreme Court, is in the hands of Alexandre de Moraes, who will preside over the TSE during the electoral process and who has already been branded a “rascal” by Bolsonaro.

On the same Wednesday, Bolsonaro’s defense asked to dismiss one of those lawsuits, centered precisely on the attacks on the polls and in a statement in which he even threatened to “ignore” the election results if the ballots were not voted.

According to the president’s lawyers, although his criticisms are “harsh and emphatic”, they do not go beyond the exposition of “some frailties that, as he thinks, exist in the electronic system”, so his campaign is part of the “right to freedom of expression and opinion.

Source: EFE

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