Trump said Monday that Brazil’s runoff “looked like another rigged election,” but the one irregularity anyone has named touched about 35,000 ballots in a race Lula won by 4.42 million.
- Lula took 64.25 million votes to 59.83 million, a margin a little wider than the roughly 4.3 million we reported on election night.
- Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party recognized the result on Monday, saying only that the questions raised “need to be properly clarified.” Flávio Bolsonaro has not conceded. He dropped Sunday’s vow to annul the vote and now says he will ask a court to disqualify Lula for abusing political and economic power, without offering evidence.
- The two extra hours of voting ordered Sunday were requested by both campaigns, Lula’s citing transit failures and Bolsonaro’s citing rain. An Insper professor’s analysis of electoral records found fewer than 35,000 ballots were cast in them.
- Our arithmetic: subtract every one of those ballots from Lula’s total and he still wins by more than 4.3 million. His margin is more than 126 times the size of the extension.
What Trump says
“I didn’t take sides.” In the same remarks he said the vote looked like “another rigged election, frankly,” and called the decision to prolong voting “very strange.” He offered no evidence for either charge.
What the record shows
On Oct. 5, outside the White House, he called Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round lead “a very, very big victory.” In July Brazil refused visas to two State Department officials who, sources said, were headed to cast doubt on its electoral system. Last year he put steep tariffs on Brazilian goods over the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro.
The Word “Another” Gives It Away
Everything in the remark that can be checked has been checked, and none of it holds. The extension covered about 0.03 percent of ballots, and the electoral court’s president, Kassio Nunes Marques, a Jair Bolsonaro appointee, rejected the suggestion that the extra time changed the result. Vice President Geraldo Alckmin called Trump’s comments “totally wrong” and “unfounded”. That leaves the word “another,” which is Trump’s and carries no finding. We read it as a pointer back to his own 2020 loss, which he still insists was rigged, and it explains why the claim never needed Brazil’s facts.
Brazil’s institutions held. The damage is in what a loser can now do with an American president’s sentence. Flávio Bolsonaro, whose own party accepted the result, now has Trump’s sentence to point to while he pursues a disqualification case reportedly aimed at a welfare increase Lula announced in the campaign’s last days, an ordinary complaint a court can weigh. Trump cheered Bolsonaro’s first-round lead, called the runoff rigged after Bolsonaro lost it, and said throughout that he took no side. We think that is a slogan handed to a loser by a president who has used the same one himself.
The next test is a filing, not a speech. If Flávio Bolsonaro’s case rests on evidence of abuse of office, Brazilian judges can decide it like any other. If it arrives wrapped in the word “rigged,” the 4.42 million margin and the 35,000 late ballots are the answer already on the record. He still has not said “conceded,” and Trump’s sentence gives him cover not to.