Judge rejects demand to cancel votes in Brazil

Judge rejects demand to cancel votes in Brazil

Published: Less than 10 min ago

full screen Alexandre de Moraes, HD judge and president of Brazil’s selection authority. Archive image. Photo: Eraldo Peres/AP/TT

Alexandre de Moraes, HD judge and president of Brazil’s Electoral Commission, rejects demands from the presidential party PL to invalidate votes in the last election.

Brazil’s outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro does not seem to want to admit defeat in the last presidential election when the social democrat Lula da Silva received 50.9 percent of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1.

Bolsonaro’s PL party claims that over half of the voting machines in the election did not work as they should. PL demanded earlier this week that all votes from the machines that it claims are not working be declared invalid, which they believe would mean that Bolsonaro won the election.

In his decision, de Moraes writes, among other things, that the request to annul the votes had not included any evidence or facts whatsoever that irregularities had occurred. Bolsonaro’s party is also sentenced to pay 23 million reais, equivalent to more than SEK 45 million, in fines for having initiated a legal process without a valid reason.

The formal change of power in Brazil only takes place in January, but Bolsonaro himself has not appeared since election day three weeks ago. Something that is explained by the fact that a skin disease means that he cannot wear trousers.

Bolsonaro has long talked about the fully electronic voting system that Brazil has been using since the 1990s opening up to fraud. However, like the role model Donald Trump in the United States, who claims fraud in the 2020 election there, he has never presented any evidence.

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