RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The Defense Ministry released a report Wednesday highlighting flaws in Brazil’s electoral systems and proposing improvements, but there were no allegations of fraud through some protests by President Jair Bolsonaro over his Oct. 30 defeat.
It is the military’s first comment on the timing of the election, which sparked nationwide protests even as the transition to President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s inauguration began on Jan. 1. in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia and other localities calling for the intervention of the armed forces to keep Bolsonaro in power.
When the Defense Ministry announced this week that it would deliver its report on the election, some Bolsonaro supporters cheered, hoping for the imminent revelation of irrefutable proof. That happened.
“There is nothing unexpected in the document,” Diego Aranha, an associate professor of systems security at Denmark’s Aarhus University and a member of the Brazilian election authority’s public protection tests, told The Associated Press. “The limitations discovered are the same ones that analysts have complained about for decades. . . But that doesn’t show any evidence of wrongdoing. “
Defense Minister Paulo Nogueira wrote that it is “not imaginable to say” with certainty that the automatic vote tabulation formula was not infiltrated through malicious code, but the 65-page report cites no anomalies in the vote count. However, the report suggests the risk of creating a commission composed of members of civil society and audit institutions to further investigate the operation of electronic voting machines.
Bolsonaro, whose loss of fewer than two issues represents the narrowest margin since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, has not protested in particular since the election.
However, his persistent refusal to admit defeat or congratulate his opponent left enough room for enthusiasts to draw their own conclusions. And this follows more than a year of Bolsonaro claiming that Brazil’s electronic voting formula is prone to fraud, without presenting any evidence, even on orders from the electoral authority.
In the months leading up to the vote, when polls showed him trailing da Silva, Bolsonaro pushed for the military to assume a broader role in the electoral process. The electoral authority, in a move aimed at appeasing the president, allowed unprecedented participation through the Armed Forces. The report presented on Wednesday was signed through the Minister of Defense and representatives of the Army, the Armed Forces and the Air Force.
The electoral authority said in a statement that it “welcomed the latest report from the Ministry of Defense which, like all other control bodies, found no fraud or inconsistencies in the electronic voting machines and the 2022 electoral process. “
Bolsonaro did not comment on the report, nor did the presidential palace respond to an AP email. His party leader said Tuesday that the president would only question the effects of the election if the report provides “real” evidence.
Da Silva, speaking Wednesday in the capital Brasilia, on his first stop since the election, told reporters that blank voting and Brazil’s electronic voting formula is a success.
“No one is going to listen to the coup speech of someone who lost the election,” da Silva said. “We know that establishments have been attacked through some government authorities. “
Brazil began using an electronic voting formula in 1996. Election security makes those formulas less secure than hand-marked paper ballots because they don’t leave a verifiable paper trail. However, Brazil’s formula is tightly controlled and the national government and foreign observers have never uncovered evidence that it is being exploited to commit fraud. External security audits were conducted to prevent formula software from being surreptitiously modified. In addition, before election day, tests are carried out to ensure that no manipulation has occurred.
The electoral authority said on Wednesday that it would analyze the Defense Ministry’s leads. Aranha, a professor of system security, said the military’s clues to fix the flaws are not express and would actually make an audit even more difficult.
This year, the armed forces also conducted a partial audit, comparing the effects of many polling stations with the official count. The concept first emerged through Bolsonaro, who said in May that they “will not play the role of simply approving the electoral procedure. “or participate as spectators. “
The federal government’s watchdog conducted a partial audit of the army, counting votes in 604 voting machines across Brazil. He found no anomalies. Similarly, the Brazilian Bar Association said in a report Tuesday that it had not discovered anything to indicate suspected wrongdoing.
“There are vital classes of all this,” said Paulo Calmon, a political science professor at the University of Brasilia, who continued: “Primarily, the concept of officially involving the armed forces in electoral processes is a mistake that will never be repeated. “
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Associated Press Carla Bridi reported from Brasilia. AP videojournalist Juan Arraez and David Biller in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
Over the past 10 months, other young people, many of them black and Hispanic, were shot and killed by relatives at home, shot at pool parties and birthday parties, and killed by other teenagers in parking lots, apartments.