Judge rejects Bolsonaro's lawsuit alleging fraud in elections

The president of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court, Alexandre de Moraes, rejected the appeal filed by soon-to-be-former President Jair Bolsonaro challenging the result of the presidential election for alleged irregularities. In addition, the judge fined the Liberal Party $4.3 million for what he described as "bad faith" in filing the lawsuit.

Bolsonaro claimed that every electronic ballot box should have its own identifier, which makes it possible to check the votes cast in each one of them. However, as MP Filipe Barros explains on his Twitter account, "In the ballot boxes prior to the UE2020 model, the 'ballot box registers' show the same code. There are 250,000 ballot boxes with the same 'CPF.' In other words, there is no way to differentiate the votes that were introduced in each of them individually."

"Totally fraudulent narrative"

Judge de Moraes wrote in his ruling that this problem "did not affect reliability and that each voting machine remained easily identifiable by other means." In addition, he asserted that the intention of the appeal was to provoke undemocratic protest movements and create civil unrest.

Therefore, de Moraes ruled that "the complete bad faith of the plaintiff's strange and unlawful petition ... was demonstrated, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and by the total absence of evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narration of the facts." As a result, the president of the Superior Electoral Court ordered an investigation of the party's president, Valdemar Costa.