Valdemar Costa Neto, Liberal Party president (also known in Brazil as PL), avoided talking during the press conference he convened to announce that he had handed in to the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE, in Portuguese) a report questioning the result of the second round of the presidential election and demanding the annulment of votes in electronic voting machines fabricated until 2020.
The party’s position is fragile. It demands the annulment of the presidential election by arguing that there was fraud in the electronic voting machines in the second round. But it intends to keep the votes for all the other political posts in the first round in which the party got good results, electing the largest number of parliamentarians to the Chamber of Deputies: 99 federal deputies.
The measure was taken forward to keep the thesis, which is spread among Bolsonaro supporters, that intend to prevent the acknowledgment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over Bolsonaro. Lula (Workers’ Party) will be Brazil’s next head of state, and Bolsonaro (Liberal Party) was the first Brazilian president to not be reelected.
Alexandre de Moraes, president of Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, answered quickly and attacked Costa Neto’s most sensitive point. The party will have to put at risk all its caucus elected in the first round of elections if it intends to keep the demand.
“Therefore, under penalty of rejection, the author has to add [to] the initial petition within 24 (twenty-four) hours so that the request covers both rounds of elections. It has to be published urgently”.
Fragile and lonely position
Due to Neto's ambiguous position, he said few words during the press conference. However, from what he said, it could be seen that he is in a fragile position. “I must say it [the report] was a surprise to me. This report doesn’t express the Liberal Party’s opinion. But it’s the result of the study of skilled experts."
The report was made by Instituto Voto Legal (Legal Vote Institute, in English), headed by engineer Carlos César Rocha, who, in 2012, patented an electronic voting machine that emits printed votes at the National Institute of Industrial Property (Inpi, in Portuguese). The document expired in 2012 and has not yet been renewed.
Rocha attended Costa Neto’s press conference with Marcelo Bessa, the Liberal Party lawyer, who justified, with the same hesitation, the representation filed with the TSE. "These inconsistencies don’t allow for certifying the electoral result. This doesn’t mean that a fraud occurred, but there is the possibility of [the system being] fragile."
The 33-page report states that 192,000 electronic voting machines fabricated before 2020 had problems with their “logs”. According to the party, if the votes from these machines were annulled, Bolsonaro would have won the presidential election.
The Liberal Party’s fragile position is, also, a lonely one. The security of the electronic voting machines was attested by the Brazilian Bar Association (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil in Portuguese), the Armed Forces, and Brazil’s Federal Audit Court (Tribunal de Contas da União, in Portuguese).
Edited by: Nicolau Soares e Flávia Chacon
