Polls ended in the highly profitable presidential election in Brazil. Now here’s what to expect next.
Because Brazil is the only country in the world to use a fully electronic voting system, counting votes has historically been relatively quick, especially for such a large country. Election officials said Sunday that they hope to be able to call the campaign at 7 p.m. ET.
At hundreds of thousands of polling stations around the country, officials aggregate the voting results from each voting machine and forward those ballots to the federal election agency in Brasília, the nation’s capital.
On Sunday, all polling stations will close at the same time, even though the country is located across three time zones. However, results will trickle in for a few hours and, significantly, early gains are expected to favor President Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent.
Why? The answer is largely down to Brazil’s internet infrastructure.
Support for Mr Bolsonaro and other right-wing candidates has historically been stronger in the richer, more developed regions of Brazil, where there are more robust internet connections than in poorer areas. tend to favor leftist candidates such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mr. Bolsonaro’s challenger on Sunday.
That’s especially true in Brazil’s vast, impoverished northeastern countryside, which has about 27% of the electorate and has long been Mr. da Silva’s stronghold.
As a result, Brazilians are accustomed to watching conservative candidates rise to the top after polls close and then watch left-wing candidates close the gap – or sometimes overtake them. Prime – at the end of the voting period.
But Mr Bolsonaro has repeatedly pointed to that trend – without any credible evidence – as a sign of fraud, part of the a broader, multi-year attempt to hack Brazil’s electronic voting system.
In the 2014 presidential election, a centre-right candidate led for hours in the back-and-forth vote until the leftist candidate from his party da Silva finally overcame him and won. be president. The losing candidate claimed something was wrong and requested an audit, and Mr Bolsonaro, an MP at the time, supported the cause.
This trend happened again during the first round of voting earlier this month. Mr Bolsonaro took the lead at the start of the count until Mr da Silva passed him.
Days later, Mr. Bolsonaro held up a chart about the return of votes, claiming that he was the victim of fraud. The model in the returned ticket, he said, looks “quite like an algorithm”.
There has been no evidence of fraud in Brazilian electronic voting machines since their introduction in 1996.
