RIO DE JANEIRO – Facing the prospect of a crushing defeat in next year’s elections, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is mobilizing supporters to fight for survival against the voting machines.
Troubled by the devastating toll of the coronavirus, a pulsating economy and a rising rival, the president has launched a full-blown attack on the electronic voting system that Brazil has relied on for 25 years. Bolsonaro has warned that the 2022 election could be postponed unless voters register their choices on paper ballots, which the current system does not allow.
“An election outside those parameters is not an election,” Mr. Bolsonaro told supporters during a recent rally in the southern state of Florianópolis, calling on his base to “fight with all arms”.
The prospect of a shaky showdown next year surfaced on Tuesday as Mr. Bolsonaro’s government organized a military parade, with armored tanks hours before Congress set legislators to vote on a bill that would require paper ballots. Electronic Voting Machines will be required to print.
The measure to bring back paper ballots was widely expected to be rejected as it was opposed by most major parties.
But the campaign for a return to a paper ballot system – Mr Bolsonaro’s long-time obsession – has alarmed leaders in the judiciary, opposition lawmakers and political scientists, who in their playbook build on power-grabbing in Latin America’s largest nation. Let’s see. Election officials and independent experts say Brazil’s electronic voting system, which was adopted in 1996, has strong security measures and an excellent track record.
Luis Roberto Barroso, the Supreme Court justice and the head of Brazil’s electoral tribunal, said in a recent speech, “Defiling public debate with misinformation, lies, hatred and conspiracy theories is undemocratic practice.”
Citing democratic backwardness in Turkey, Hungary, Nicaragua and Venezuela, Justice Barroso said it has become dangerously common for leaders who come to power through the ballot box to be “brick by brick, the pillars of democracy.” “
Critics fear that President Donald J. Like many Trump supporters convinced he was robbed of victory in 2020, Mr Bolsonaro is laying the groundwork to dispute an election defeat in October 2022.
Fernando Luiz Abruccio, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, said such a scenario could cause far more devastation in Brazil, where democracy was only restored in the late 1980s, than in the United States.
“If he loses the election, he can mobilize the military, the police, the militias,” Mr Abruccio said. “The degree of violence may be much greater than what happened at the US Capitol.”
The military demonstration on Tuesday triggered a series of blasphemous statements more memories.
“It is unacceptable that the armed forces are allowed to use their image in such a way as to increase the likelihood of the use of force in support of the anti-coup democratic measure defended by the president,” nine Opposition parties said in a statement.
Mr. Bolsonaro began railing against the voting system several years ago, when he was a fringe, ultra-conservative member of Congress who had little power or visibility in the capital.
In 2015, he proposed a constitutional amendment requiring electronic machines to print a record of each vote, which would be stored in a ballot box. Mr Bolsonaro argued at the time That redundancy will reduce the “cheating probability to zero”.
Congress approved the measure, but the Supreme Court said it violated confidentiality and ruled it unconstitutional, meaning the voting system remained unchanged.
The matter faded from the political radar until Mr Bolsonaro emerged as a presidential contender after the first round of voting in the October 2018 election. Instead of celebrating his victory, Mr Bolsonaro stunned the political establishment by claiming that he was robbed of an outright victory, which would have required winning more than 50 percent of the vote.
Even after winning the election by a margin of 10 percentage points in 2018, Mr Bolsonaro continued to claim without providing evidence that the system was rigged. His quest to discredit the integrity of the election system has gotten louder and more audacious in recent weeks as Mr Bolsonaro’s stand in the election slips amid growing resentment over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
A poll conducted in early August by the firm Podar Data shows that one in every five voters who supported Mr Bolsonaro in 2018 will now vote for his main rival, former President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. In a two-candidate contest, Mr da Silva would lose 32 per cent from the current 52 per cent, According to public opinion.
Mr. de Silva on Tuesday accused the president of using the printed vote debate to divert attention from his track record on unemployment and poverty, which have risen during the pandemic.
“Bolsonaro must be prepared to face the fact: he is going to lose the election,” Mr. de Silva said in a statement, raising the possibility that the incumbent would refuse to participate in the traditional transfer of power.
Supreme Court justices have reacted with alarm to Mr Bolsonaro’s attacks against the voting system, played down in lengthy interviews by conservative journalists and in videos circulated on social media by the president. Earlier this month, the court began an investigation into the president’s claims about voting machine fraud.
Philippe Barros, an MP who backs Mr Bolsonaro, said in an interview that electronic machines can be tampered with and that paper ballots would create a mechanism to independently authenticate results recorded by machines.
“It is a threat to democracy,” he said.
Experts say that voting machines in Brazil, where voting is mandatory, have strong security arrangements. They are not connected to the Internet, which makes it impossible to hack them all. Voters’ identity is verified by a biometric scanner that scans an individual’s fingerprint.
Last month eight former attorneys general issued a statement calling for efforts to make a paper ballot system unconstitutional, arguing that the added move would compromise the right to vote in secret. In Brazil, the Office of the Attorney General is in charge of investigating electoral crimes.
Experts say that before the current system was adopted, it was common for political power brokers to take people to polls and verify how they filled ballots.
Former Attorney General Raquel Dodge, one of the signatories to the letter, said “the current voting system has never been questioned, nor is there any evidence that it has ever been tampered with.” “Brazil’s electoral system is very advanced, and I believe we need to make it clear and transparent to Brazilian voters and the world.”
President Biden’s administration has also demonstrated its support for the current system, with Mr. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan raising the topic with Mr. Bolsonaro during a recent visit to Brasilia.
“US officials expressed great confidence in the ability of Brazilian institutions to conduct free and fair elections with appropriate safeguards against fraud,” said Juan Gonzalez, senior director for the Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council. told reporters on Monday. “We stressed the importance of not undermining trust in that process.”