Flavio Bolsonaro is refusing to concede defeat to incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who bested him by nearly 4.4 million votes, following a chaotic delay in poll closing times ordered by a Supreme Court justice.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a vocal critic Donald Trump, was reelected Sunday in a result that provides relief to critics of widening U.S. influence in Latin America.

With 100% of the vote counted, Brazil’s electoral court announced that the soon to be 81-year-old Lula had a lead of nearly 4.4 million votes over opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, giving him 51.8% of the total vote. Bolsonaro quickly refused to concede defeat and asked for the election results to be annulled after an evening of chaos at some polling places that followed a last-minute decision to extend voting by two hours.

Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Lula defeated to take the presidency in 2022.

Lula’s triumph bucks a regional trend of victories for right-of-center presidential candidates allied with Trump. It also means Latin America’s largest economy, with a GDP of $2.6 trillion per year, will likely continue defying Trump’s demands, despite the pressure of increased tariffs.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    A couple of things to understand about Brazilian elections:

    • Voting is mandatory for all citizens aged 18-70, though failing to vote nets you a 4 BRL fine (less than a dollar)[1]
    • Every Brazilian citizen has an ID with photo (I’ve only recently learned that USA doesn’t have something like a nationwide ID);
    • Election happens on a sunday and people who have to work on said day can ask to leave for 2 hours in order to vote;
    • Voting is standardized and organized at a federal level, even for municipal voting. The electoral tribunals exist solely for dealing with elections;
    • The majority of funds spent on campaigns come from the electoral fund, which is distributed to parties according to how many elected deputies, senators and governors they have (a great way to ensure big parties stay rich and well funded). Up until 2014, corporations could still donate to campaigns. After that, only citizens may donate and only up to 10% of their earnings.
    • The electronic urns are audited before and after elections[2], they are completely offline and save votes to an internal disk. Since their inception, despite many claims, no fault or fraud has ever been found on the hardware or software. Even fucking bozo and his flunkies couldn’t find any security breach back in 2022, while he was in power.
    • With how urns are distributed, it’s easy to account if the total amount of registered votes is equal to the amount of voters that showed up. This first verification is done once voting time is over by the 4 poll workers that care for each urn/section.
    • Voters have to do both ID and biometric verification (fingerprint) before voting
    • No cell phones or kids go in the booth with you (take a wild guess why “no kids”)

    1. I understand people who would rather have it be non mandatory, but think about a criminal group ensuring only “their people” go out to vote. With optional voting, it gets easier for them to ensure victory. This would be a real situation in many cities in Brazil, where said criminal groups already do everything in their power to ensure “their guys” get elected. ↩︎

    2. This isn’t a “we self audited ourselves” situation, in case you’re wondering. Universities, Federal Police, Army and several other entities, public and private, can take part in the audit ↩︎