key events
Brazil’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, is on the field in So Paulo:
The Associated Press spoke to voters on Sunday. Here’s what some of them had to say:
Health worker Fernanda Reznik, 48, wore a red T-shirt belonging to da Silva’s Workers’ Party to vote in Copacabana, where Bolsonaro supporters often congregate, and waited in line for 40 minutes.
“I’ll wait three hours if I have to!” Resnick said, who no longer bothered to talk politics with the neighbors on Bolsonaro’s side.
“This year the election is more important, because we have already gone through four years of Bolsonaro and today we can make a difference and give another direction to this country.”
Marle Melo, a 53-year-old businessman from the capital Brasilia, wore the yellow color of the Brazilian flag that Bolsonaro and his supporters had prepared for the demonstrations.
Melo said he is once again voting for Bolsonaro, who has lived up to his expectations, and does not believe the polls that show him behind.
“Elections can be manipulated. They all belong to companies with interests,” he said.
How are votes counted?
Despite the fact that Brazil is the world’s fourth-largest democracy, the country’s electronic voting system allows the results of more than 150 million eligible voters to be presented within hours of voting. And no significant fraud has ever been detected, reports the AP.
Electronic machines were first used in 1996 and the first nationwide, only electronic vote took place four years later.
Brazilian authorities adopted electronic voting machines to tackle long-standing fraud. In earlier elections, ballot boxes arrived at polling stations already filled with votes. Others were stolen and individual votes were regularly falsified, according to Brazil’s electoral authority.
A month ago, President Jair Bolsonaro was expressing concerns about the country’s electronic voting system. He has long insisted that machines used for a quarter century carry a risk of fraud, although he acknowledged last year that this has not been proven.
The system has been rigorously tested by Brazil’s top election authority.
tom phillips
Supporters and aides of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visit a hotel in Sao Paulo city to celebrate his first-round victory in Brazil’s presidential election.
The chair of Lula’s left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), speaking to the Guardian upon her arrival at the event, said she was optimistic about her chances of returning to power and defeating far-right Jair Bolsonaro.
“We feel confident… we feel genuine happiness. We have faced tough and difficult moments, but we have triumphed through our resistance and our unshakable faith in our cause,” said Gliese Hoffmann.
Hoffman said that if Bolsonaro, an ally of Donald Trump, tries to contest the election like his North American friend, he will fail.
,[Bolsonaro] The result has to be respected. It is no bigger than Brazil or Brazilian institutions,” she said.
Who is Jair Bolsonaro?
Since 2019, far-right Jair Bolsonaro has led an administration marked by incendiary speeches, his testing of democratic institutions, his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the worst deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in 15 years.
But they have built a dedicated base by defending conservative values, denouncing political correctness, and projecting themselves as defending the nation from leftist policies that they consider infringing on individual liberties and causing economic turmoil. Huh.
Who is Lula?
Brazilian frontrunner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, became the country’s first working class president in 2002.
Lula stepped down in 2010 after two terms with an approval rating near 90%. But over the next decade the Workers’ Party (PT) helped entangle a tangle of corruption scandals and accused Brazil of sinking into a brutal recession.
His apparently irreparable downfall was reinforced in 2018 when he was jailed on corruption charges and barred from participating in that year’s election, which was won by Bolsonaro. Lula’s 580-day imprisonment seemed a sad end to a fairy tale life that saw her rise from rural poverty to become one of the world’s most popular leaders.
But Lula was freed in late 2019 and his sentence was rescinded on the grounds that he was wrongfully tried by a right-wing judge, Sergio Moro, who later took a job in Bolsonaro’s cabinet. .
Lula, who first sought the presidency in 1989, declared his sixth presidency in May, vowing to defeat Bolsonaro by staging “the greatest peaceful revolution the world has ever seen”.
Voting closed in Brazil election
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the Brazilian elections. I am Helen SullivanAnd I’ll let you know about the results as soon as they arrive. The counting of votes has already started and the results are likely to be out within the next 90 minutes.
Pre-election polls suggest that the country’s leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was president from 2003 to 2010, may win outright to avoid a second run-off.
One poll gave Lula 51% to Bolsonaro’s 37%, another gave him 50% and 36% respectively.