More than three weeks after losing a re-election bid, outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday blamed a software bug and demanded the electoral authority annul votes cast on most of the nation’s electronic voting machines, though independent experts say the bug doesn’t affect the reliability of results.
Such an action would leave Bolsonaro with 51 per cent of the remaining valid votes — and a re-election victory, Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party, told reporters.
The electoral authority has already declared victory for Bolsonaro’s nemesis, leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and even many of Bolsonaro’s allies have accepted the results. Protesters in cities across the country have steadily refused to do the same, particularly with Bolsonaro declining to concede.
Liberal Party leader Valdemar Costa Neto and an auditor hired by the party told reporters in Brasilia, the country’s capital, that their evaluation found all machines dating from before 2020 — nearly 280,000 of them, or about 59 per cent of the total used in the Oct . 30 runoff — lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.
Neither explained how that might have
