RIO DE JANEIRO — For greater than a yr, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil had warned that he won’t settle for a loss in final month’s presidential election. Then he misplaced. In response, he reluctantly agreed to start the transition of energy — whereas his allies inspected the election outcomes for proof of something amiss.
Now his marketing campaign claims to have discovered it: a small software program bug within the voting machines. This week, his marketing campaign filed a request to successfully overturn the election in Mr. Bolsonaro’s favor, saying the bug ought to nullify votes from about 60 p.c of the voting machines.
Of the remaining votes, Mr. Bolsonaro would win 51 p.c, the marketing campaign stated, making him the victor as a substitute of the leftist former president who defeated him, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The request is a Hail Mary, with little technical foundation and little likelihood of success. Impartial consultants say the bug had no impression on the integrity of the vote. And election officers signaled that they might virtually definitely dismiss the marketing campaign’s claims.
In response to the request on Tuesday, Brazil’s elections chief gave the marketing campaign 24 hours to clarify why it had solely questioned votes from the election’s second spherical, wherein Mr. Bolsonaro misplaced, and never the primary spherical, wherein his political get together gained essentially the most seats in Congress utilizing the identical voting machines. The top of Mr. Bolsonaro’s get together stated on Wednesday that it lacked details about the primary spherical.
On brief discover on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberals get together known as reporters to a resort in Brasília, the nation’s capital, to clarify its findings.
Valdemar Costa Neto, the get together’s president, stated the software program bug demanded a evaluation of the election outcomes. “There can’t be any doubts concerning the vote,” he stated. “If it is a stain on our democracy, we now have to unravel it now.”
The software program bug highlighted by Mr. Bolsonaro’s marketing campaign causes an error in a single doc produced by some older voting machines. The error impacts the identification quantity linked to the voting machine. Liberal Get together officers argued that made it troublesome to confirm the votes.
Impartial pc safety consultants who’ve studied Brazil’s voting machines and who reviewed the marketing campaign’s findings stated that was flawed. They stated that whereas the bug exists, it has no bearing on the integrity of the outcomes. That’s as a result of there are a selection of different methods to determine the voting machines, together with on the very paperwork which have the error.
“They identified a bug that must be corrected. That’s nice, and it’s really simple to right,” stated Marcos Simplício, a cybersecurity researcher on the College of São Paulo. However he stated that the marketing campaign’s suggestion that votes ought to be nullified is like arguing a automobile is totaled due to a scratch on the door.
“Attempt to persuade your insurance coverage firm of that,” he stated. “It’s nonsense. Full nonsense.”