Judge Fines Bolsonaro Camp In Attempt To Overturn Brazil Presidential Elections

Attempts on the side of Jair Bolsonaro to overturn the recent Brazilian Presidential elections have hit a snag. This was after a Brazilian judge ended up rejected by the former Brazilian president’s camp while also fining them $4.3 million in what the court termed as bad faith litigation.

The supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, ordered the decision to fine Bolsonaro and company after the former president challenged the election on account of a software bug, the Guardian reported.

The 67-year-old had wanted the votes affected to be invalidated on most of the nation’s electronic voting machines, the Associated Press reported.

It was during an audit made on Oct. 30 that the Bolsonaro camp found signs of irreparable … malfunction in some of the electronic voting machines.

“The complete bad faith of the plaintiff’s bizarre and illicit request … was proven, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and the total absence of any evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narrative of the facts,” de Moraes wrote in his final decision.

It was on Tuesday when the camp of Bolsonaro filed a 33-page request, singling out a software bug in the majority of the voting machines. They lacked individual identification numbers in their internal logs, leading them to call to nullify the affected votes.

But as mentioned in a previous post here on Latin Times, experts bat that the bug does not affect the reliability of the results.

Bolsonaro would have benefitted if his complaint prospered. It would see him with 51% of the remaining valid votes and a re-election win according to Marcelo de Bessa.

“De Moraes’ message to the political establishment is: the game is over. Questioning the result of the elections is not fair play, and people and institutions who do that will be punished harshly,” Maurício Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, stated.