The Brazilian Ministry of Defense published a report on Wednesday in which it highlighted the flaws in the nation’s electoral systems and proposed improvements, but there was nothing to corroborate the accusations of fraud launched by some of the supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro, who protest their defeat in the second round of the presidential elections on October 30.
It was the first public comment by the armed forces on the second round of the elections, which have sparked nationwide protests even when the transition for the swearing-in of President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on January 1 has already begun. .
Thousands of people have been gathering outside military installations in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia and other cities to demand the intervention of the armed forces to keep Bolsonaro in office.
When the Ministry of Defense announced this week that it would present its report on the elections, some of Bolsonaro’s supporters celebrated, anticipating the imminent revelation of hard evidence. That didn’t happen.
“There is nothing surprising in the document,” said Diego Aranha, an assistant professor of systems security at Denmark’s Aarhus University, who has been a member of the Brazilian electoral authority’s public security tests. “The limitations that were found are the same ones that some analysts have been complaining about for decades … but that doesn’t point to proof of wrongdoing,” he noted.
Defense Minister Paulo Nogueira wrote that “it is not possible to say” with certainty that the computerized vote tabulation system has not been infiltrated by malicious code, but the 65-page report cites no anomaly in the vote count. . However, based on the possible risk, the report suggests the creation of a commission made up of members of civil society and auditing bodies to further investigate the operation of electronic voting machines.
Bolsonaro, whose defeat by less than two percentage points was the narrowest margin since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, has not denounced specific wrongdoing since the election.