Brazil: Court Fines Bolsonaro’s Party over Undocumented Fraud Claim

By Staff, Agencies

The Superior Electoral Court of Brazil has rejected the request of outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's party to annul part of the votes in the 2022 presidential election and fined it 22.9 million reals [$4.2 million], the Brazilian media reported on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro's Liberal Party claimed that the electronic voting system was "poorly functioning" and requested that votes cast through them be annulled. The court gave the party 24 hours to provide evidence.

According to the reports, Brazilian Superior Electoral Court President Alexandre de Moraes rejected the request, saying that the party was "going to the court with bad intentions." The court also imposed a fine of 22.9 million reals on the party.

The Tuesday complaint had alleged that five different ballot boxes had "malfunctioned" and effectively made over 350,000 votes invalid. Had Bolsonaro's challenge been accepted the difference in ballots would have put the win by President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in limbo.

Bolsonaro and company had been given a period of 24 hours to file additional paperwork to further substantiate the allegations, as the submission did not include documentation of the ballot boxes in question during the first round of the October election.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidential election in the runoff on October 30. He already served two terms from 2003 to 2010 and was then confronted by criminal prosecution on corruption charges. He began serving a 12-year sentence in 2018, but Brazil's Supreme Court later annulled the case, and Lula was released from prison in 2019. His term in office will begin on January 1, 2023.