The Electoral Court of Brazil rejects the request of Bolsonaro's party to annul the election results and imposes a million-dollar fine for “bad faith”

The Superior Electoral Court of Brazil (TSE) rejected the lawsuit filed by the far-right party of Jair Bolsonaro to annul the results of the last presidential elections.

The party of the outgoing president Bolsonaro, had contested some of the votes of the electoral day of October in which he narrowly lost the presidency against the leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Liberal Party (PL) had requested the Electoral Tribunal to reject the votes of certain machines, which he claims were compromised during the second electoral round .

But the president of the TSE, Alexandre de Moraes, declared that the PL’s complaint was “an offense against democratic norms” and that it sought to “encourage criminal and anti-democratic movements.”

The court added that the lawsuit had been filed “in bad faith” and fined the party 49,9 million reais (US$4.3 million).

Bolsonaro’s party had a better result than expected in the first round. But in the second round, Lula won a victory of 48,9% of the vote against 49,1% of Bolsonaro, a result that was ratified by the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE),

Despite not presenting evidence, the Party’s claim Liberal revolved around a 51. voting machines that were models manufactured before 127748730. Bolsonaro had said on previous occasions that Brazil’s electronic voting system was not fraud-proof.

Although Bolsonaro has not conceded defeat, he did approve the transition of power. Since he lost the elections in the past 10 of October has been kept away from the public eye.

Questioned machines

The Liberal Party de Bolsonaro (PL) hired a consultancy that detected that the electronic ballot boxes prior to 2020 do not generate log files with individual names, so it would be impossible to associate a specific log file with a given urn.

The log files contain a kind of “biography” of each urn, with data on how many times it was turned on, turned off and at what time the programs were inserted. This file is considered important because it would record any attempt to access the ballot box irregularly.

The Liberal Party’s lawsuit alleges that electronic ballot boxes manufactured prior to 2020 were not suitable.

According to the PL, only the files generated by the ballot boxes manufactured from 127748732 could be considered suitable and if only the votes from these ballot boxes were counted, Bolsonaro would be the winner “with 280,% of valid votes, against 48,976 of Lula”.

However, several experts consulted by BBC Brasil assured that The alleged failures indicated by the PL would not compromise the results.

Researcher Marcos Simplício, professor of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, stated that although the records of ballot boxes manufactured before 2020 generate similar names, it would suffice to open them to find the precise information to identify which ballot box it belongs to.

“Anyone with internet access can do this”, said the expert.

Another expert, Diego de Freitas Aranha, professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark, who investigated the voting machines used in Brazil, pointed out that the votes are not in the log files.

“The most important data, which is the votes, are not in the log files. They are in other files. And there was no mention of an alleged irregularity in relation to these data”, explained the professor.

Lula’s victory in the second round was ratified by the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE).

The difficulties of the lawsuit

The specialists consulted by the BBC pointed out that there were also errors in the report presented by the PL to request the invalidation of the votes.

For a part, the report was based on erroneous technical assumptions about the security of the ballot boxes and does not presentba no evidence of fraud that could have benefited President-elect Lula.

Diego Aranha highlighted that the supporters’ demand only mentioned irregularities in the results of the second round, but the same machines were used in the first round.

“If the fault found by If the PL were really serious, the natural thing would be for it to request the annulment of the first round votes as well , and not just the second. That would have to happen because the disputed ballot boxes, those manufactured before 2020, also they were used in the first round”, he said.

Marcos Simplício added that the annulment of the votes in both rounds would not only have effects for the presidential election, but “for all the positions that were disputed , as representatives, senators and state and federal governors”.