President Jair Bolsonaro's attack on Brazil's voting system due to his position in the polls is on par with the chaotic 2020 elections in the United States.

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Authors: Flavia Millholens and Ernesto Rondoño

Rio de Janeiro-Faced with the prospect of a disastrous defeat in the polls next year, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is urging supporters to fight a survival battle against the voting machine.

Due to the devastating losses caused by the coronavirus, the economic downturn, and the rise of competitors, the President launched a full-scale attack on Brazil's 25-year-old electronic voting system. Unless voters can record their choices on paper ballots (which is not allowed under the current system), Mr. Bolsonaro warned that the 2022 elections may be suspended.

"An election that exceeds these parameters is not an election," Mr. Bolsonaro told supporters at a recent rally in the southern city of Florianopolis, calling on his base to be prepared to "fight with all weapons." ".

On Tuesday, the Bolsonaro government organized a military parade in which armored tanclones drove past Congress. Just a few hours before legislators planned to debate a bill requiring electronic voting machines to print paper ballots, instability erupted next year. The prospect of the showdown is faintly visible.

The House of Commons voted to reject the proposal on Tuesday night.

But the movement to restore the paper ballot system — Mr. Bolsonaro’s long-standing obsession — shocked judicial leaders, opposition legislators and political scientists, who saw in his script the Latin American The factor of the biggest country's struggle for power. Election officials and independent experts stated that the electronic voting system adopted by Brazil in 1996 has strong safeguards and an excellent record.

"It is undemocratic to tarnish public debate with false information, lies, hatred and conspiracy theories," said Luís Roberto Barroso, Justice of the Supreme Court of Brazil and head of the Brazilian Electoral Tribunal, in a recent report. Said in the speech.

Taking the democratic regressions in Turkey, Hungary, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as examples, Judge Barroso said that it has become very common for leaders to come to power through the ballot box to "deconstruct the pillars of democracy brick by brick."

Critics worry that, just as President Donald J. Trump convinced many supporters that he would win in 2020, Mr. Bolsonaro is laying the groundwork to challenge the October 2022 election failure.

Fernando Luiz Abrucio, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, said that this situation could cause even greater chaos in Brazil than in the United States, where democracy only took place in the late 1980s. recover.

"If he loses the election, he can mobilize the army, the police and the militia," Mr. Abrucio said. "The level of violence may be much more serious than what happened in the U.S. Capitol."

Tuesday's military display triggered a series of condemnation statements and memes.

Nine opposition parties said in a statement: “The armed forces allow their image to be used in this way to increase the possibility of using force to support the coup-ideated anti-democratic measures defended by the president. This is unacceptable.”

A few years ago, Mr. Bolsonaro began to criticize the voting system when he was a marginal and ultra-conservative member of Congress with little power or visibility in the capital.

In 2015, he proposed a constitutional amendment requiring electronic machines to print a record of each ballot and store it in the ballot box. Mr. Bolsonaro argued at the time that the layoffs would “reduce the possibility of fraud to zero”.

Congress approved the measure, but the Supreme Court said it violated privacy and ruled that it was unconstitutional, which meant that the voting system remained unchanged.

After the first round of voting in the October 2018 general election, Mr. Bolsonaro became the leader of the president, and this incident disappeared from the political radar. Mr. Bolsonaro did not celebrate his victory, but claimed that he was deprived of a complete victory, which shocked the political establishment, which required more than 50% of the vote.

Even after he won the election in 2018 with a 10 percentage point margin, Mr. Bolsonaro continued to claim, without presenting evidence, that the system was rigged. Decline, as the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has become increasingly irritating, his questioning of the integrity of the electoral system has become louder and bolder.

A poll conducted by Poder Data in early August showed that one in five voters who supported Mr. Bolsonaro in 2018 will now vote for his main rival, former President Luis Inácio. Lula da Silva. Opinion polls show that in the duel between the two candidates, Da Silva will defeat the current president by 52% to 32%.

Mr. Da Silva on Tuesday accused the president of using printed voting debates to divert attention from his record of increased unemployment and poverty during the pandemic.

"Bolsonaro must be prepared to face the fact that he will lose the election," Mr. Da Silva said in a statement, raising the possibility that the incumbent will refuse to participate in the traditional power transfer ceremony.

The Supreme Court judge reacted in shock to Mr. Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting system, which were reflected in long interviews by conservative journalists and in videos broadcast by the president on social media. Earlier this month, the court launched an investigation into the president's allegations of fraudulent voting machines.

In an interview, Filipe Barros, the MP who supports Bolsonaro, said that electronic machines may be tampered with, and paper ballots will create a mechanism to independently prove the results of machine records.

"This is the risk of democracy," he said.

Experts say that Brazil's voting machines are mandatory and have strong security measures. They are not connected to the Internet, which makes them almost impossible to crack. The identity of a voter is verified by a biometric scanner that scans a person's fingerprint.

Last month, eight former attorneys general issued a statement calling for efforts to establish a paper voting system unconstitutional, arguing that the additional steps would undermine the right to secret voting. In Brazil, the Office of the Attorney General is responsible for investigating election crimes.

Experts say that before the current system was adopted, it was common for political power brokers to take people to polling stations and verify how they filled out ballots.

"The current voting system has never been questioned, and there is no evidence that it has been tampered with," said former Attorney General Rackel Dodge, one of the signatories of the letter. "Brazil’s electoral system is very advanced, and I think we need to make it clear to Brazilian voters and the world."

President Biden’s government has also shown support for the current system, and Biden’s national security adviser Jack Sullivan raised this topic with Bolsonaro during his recent visit to Brasilia.

Juan González, senior director of the Western Hemisphere of the National Security Council, told reporters on Monday that US officials "have full confidence in the ability of Brazilian institutions to conduct free and fair elections and take appropriate measures to prevent fraud." "We emphasized the importance of not undermining confidence in the process."