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The polls have closed in Brazil’s high-stakes presidential election. Now right here is what to anticipate subsequent.
As a result of Brazil is the one nation on this planet that makes use of a completely digital voting system, the counting of ballots has traditionally occurred comparatively shortly, significantly for a rustic so huge. Election officers stated on Sunday that they hoped to have the ability to name the competition by 7 p.m. Jap time.
At lots of of 1000’s of polling stations throughout the nation, officers mixture the vote outcomes from every voting machine and transmit these tallies to the federal election company in Brasília, the nation’s capital.
On Sunday, all polling stations will shut on the similar time, although the nation is unfold throughout three time zones. But the outcomes will trickle in over a number of hours and, considerably, the early returns are anticipated to skew towards President Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent.
Why? The reply, largely, has to do with Brazil’s web infrastructure.
Help for Mr. Bolsonaro and different right-wing candidates has traditionally been stronger within the extra developed, wealthier areas in Brazil, the place there are extra sturdy web connections than within the poorer areas that are inclined to favor leftists candidates like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mr. Bolsonaro’s challenger on Sunday.
That’s significantly true in Brazil’s huge, poor, rural northeast, which accounts for about 27 % of voters and has lengthy been Mr. da Silva’s stronghold.
Consequently, Brazilians have turn out to be accustomed to watching conservative candidates get out to early leads after the polls shut after which see leftist candidates shut the hole — or generally overtake their opponents — towards the tip of the vote counts.
However Mr. Bolsonaro has repeatedly pointed to that pattern — with none credible proof — as a sign of fraud, a part of a broader, yearslong effort to attack Brazil’s electronic voting system.
Within the 2014 presidential election, a center-right candidate led for hours within the vote returns till the leftist candidate from Mr. da Silva’s social gathering ultimately overtook him and received the presidency. The shedding candidate claimed one thing was amiss and demanded an audit, and Mr. Bolsonaro, a congressman on the time, championed the trigger.
The pattern occurred once more within the first spherical of voting earlier this month. Mr. Bolsonaro led firstly of counting till Mr. da Silva overtook him.
Days later, Mr. Bolsonaro held up a graph of the vote returns and recommended he had been the sufferer of fraud. The sample within the vote returns, he stated, appeared “fairly like an algorithm.”
There is no such thing as a proof of fraud in Brazil’s digital voting machines since they had been launched in 1996.
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