The president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Alexandre de Moraes, has imposed a fine of more than four million euros on Jair Bolsonaro’s party, the Liberal Party, after the outgoing president’s political formation asked to partially invalidate last October’s elections.
According to Moraes, the action of Bolsonaro’s party — which filed a request questioning the reliability of 61 percent of the electronic ballot boxes used during the elections — does not present any indication or evidence of fraud that would justify the re-evaluation of part of the votes recorded in the ballot boxes, G1 has reported.
For this reason, the magistrate has condemned the Liberal Party coalition to pay a fine of almost 23 million Brazilian reais (4.2 million euros) for «bad faith litigation».
The action of Bolsonaro’s party is based on a report of a private consultancy commissioned by the Liberal Party that points out that the president was the candidate who collected more votes in electronic ballot boxes manufactured from 2020, the newest ones, as opposed to ballot boxes with an old serial number, which «cannot be audited».
The report points out that 61 percent of the ballot boxes, almost 578,000 of them, are of a less recent model that do not allow to review the votes recorded in it, according to the cited media.
However, the party did not include the first round of the elections in the audit, alleging that it found no problems, a reason that has led Moraes to qualify the organization’s request as «strange», «illicit» and carried out in an inconsequential manner.
Moraes has maintained that the Liberal Party has attempted «against the democratic rule of law» and has used the request to «encourage criminal and anti-democratic movements».
Likewise, the president of the TSE has clarified that «it is not reasonable» to affirm that the ballot boxes do not allow to carry out a tracking of the votes. For Moraes, this argument could only have been raised out of ignorance or bad faith.
Lula beat Bolsonaro in the second round of the presidential elections with 50.9 percent of the votes, compared to 49.1 percent for Bolsonaro.
