SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazil’s top electoral authority on Monday said it had not made any arrangement with the military to conduct a parallel vote count for October’s election, amid tensions over President Jair Bolsonaro’s questioning of the system’s credibility.
The president, a far-right former army captain, has made unfounded accusations of electoral fraud and pushed for the armed forces to conduct their own vote count, as part of a campaign that critics warn is setting him up to refuse to concede defeat. Bolsonaro currently trails in opinion polls to his leftist rival, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The statement by the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) came after newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that military technicians made arrangements to visit 385 voting sites across the country and take photos of the final readout from the ballot boxes, which would be sent to a cyber warfare unit in Brasilia to verify the results in real time.
The plan, Folha reported, citing unnamed military officials, “would guarantee with 95% confidence” the final result of the vote. The newspaper said that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, currently the head of the TSE, had reached a deal with the armed forces on Aug. 31 allowing military technicians access to the results.
Brazil’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In its Monday statement, the TSE said “there was no change to what was defined in the first semester, nor any agreement with the Armed Forces or supervisory entities to allow differentiated access in real time to the data sent for the totalization of the electoral process.”
It added that, as in many previous elections, any person can go to polling booths and access the freely available final readouts to come up with their own count.
The TSE’s statement suggested the military may simply be availing itself of the pre-existing rights of any Brazilian citizen or institution to verify electoral results.
(Reporting by Peter Frontini; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
