Losing democracy in Brazil. By Augusto Zimmermann.
According to J.R. Guzzo, one of Brazil’s most accomplished journalists, the 2022 election in Brazil has been “a legal and political fraud as we have never seen in this country”. … He commented:
Lula returned to the presidency via the general collapse of the Constitution and Brazilian laws throughout the electoral process — the result of an unprecedented meddling of the judiciary, which was entirely illegal in each step of the process. The basic fact is that the judiciary, with Justice Alexandre de Moraes issuing orders and Lula in the role of its sole beneficiary, did everything it could for any neutral observer to conclude this was a rigged election …
Team globalist-bureaucrat helps out:
But there is a rather decisive international element in Lula’s victory as well. Just after a few outlets called the election in Brazil, U.S. President Joe Biden orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In a statement released immediately after the result was officially announced, Biden claimed that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”. In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, said Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result. …
In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil to issue the following warning to the Brazilian president: do not even dare even to question the reliability of your country’s electronic voting system.
A month earlier, in July 2021, the newly installed Biden sent his CIA director, William Burns, to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting, the U.S. delegation warned the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro “should stop casting doubt in his country’s [entirely electronic] electoral process”.
Next, at the June 2022 Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Biden administration notoriously repeated the same warning that the U.S. government would not tolerate Bolsonaro casting any doubt on the reliability and security of the nation’s voting machines. Since these messages came before the outcome of the election, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian president contest the alleged fairness and transparency of the electoral process. …
The US Senate has unanimously approved a resolution recommending the suspension of US-Brazil relations if there is any questioning of the security and transparency of electronic voting in Brazil, “otherwise the U.S. must consider its relations with the Brazilian government and suspend cooperation programs, including in the military area”, says the resolution. No senator, including Republicans, opposed the text presented by senators Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders. …
Was the recent Brazilian election rigged?
Fair and transparent elections invariably require paper-based voting. This is why most developed countries still use paper ballots and physical ballot boxes made of canvas, plastic, and other non-electronic materials. …
With the entirely electronic voting system implemented in Brazil, however, there is no absolute guarantee that citizens’ votes are exactly what they have cast because there is no actual physical register for each vote cast electronically. In other words, Brazilians are unable to confirm whether their votes are cast properly. … Audits are practically impossible. …
In Brazil’s case this was the seventh presidential election to use the same electronic voting machines, which are similar to self-service touchscreen devices found at fast-food restaurants. According to Ellen Theisen, CEO of the Vote-PAD Company, because the sensors in these touch-screen voting machines can be easily knocked out of alignment by shock and vibration, such machines may ultimately misinterpret and misrepresent a voter’s intent. As a result, touching candidate “Bolso” can see candidate “Louis” light up instead.
Above all, electronic voting machines are not as secure as paper-based systems because there is always the potential for hackers to tamper with the results. … In 2012, for example, a hacker stunned an audience at the Society of Engineers and Architects of Rio de Janeiro by explaining how he rigged that year’s local elections by intercepting data fed into the vote counting system. He modified the results in the computer of the regional electoral tribunal in order to favor some candidates and did so without the fraud being detected. Using the codename “Rangel”, he explains how the ruse worked:
We accessed the electoral tribunal network when the results were being transmitted and after 50% of the data had already been transmitted, we struck. We modified the results, even when the counting was about to be closed. …
On August 1, 2021, millions of people took to the streets of major cities in Brazil to protest against the apparent lack of transparency in the electronic voting system. …
The judiciary is in on the rig:
A [June 2020] opinion poll … revealed that the vast majority of Brazilians consider the performance of the judiciary “bad or horrible”. These politically aligned judges are perceived positively by only 23 percent of the population. That result demonstrated yet again that there is a near complete lack of public faith in the judiciary.
Brazil in the eyes of those same protesters seems to be on the verge of serious democratic decay, with the failure of the judiciary a critical factor contributing to the declining faith in the rule of law.[ Indeed, many Brazilians historically believe that some people, particularly judges and politicians, are never adequately punished for breaking the law, thus corruption and naked judicial partisanship continue to thrive.
This appeared to finally have changed when, in 2017, Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva was sentenced to 12 years and one month in prison for widespread corruption and money-laundering. He spent only a year and a half in jail. In 2021, the Supreme Court annulled all these convictions on entirely technical grounds. … The court simply stated that the former president should not have been prosecuted in the city of Curitiba, but rather in Brasilia, thus restoring Lula’s political rights and enabling him to contest this year’s presidential election. …
The process to appoint Supreme Court justices in Brazil is practically identical to that in the United States. … A question often raised is whether judges in Brazil are becoming an entrenched oligarchy devoid of any accountability. …
Rigging social media:
Bolsonaro relied on the Telegram app to reach his voter base. … On March 18, Justice Moraes ordered the nationwide suspension of Telegram. … He also ordered Apple and Google to introduce “technological obstacles” to block Telegram on their operating systems and withdraw it from their digital stores in Brazil. …
“Dissuading” potential opponents using the banking system:
On August 23, Moraes directed the federal police to execute search warrants in five states targeting at least eight businessmen. He ordered police to raid their homes, to access their bank accounts, and to suspend their social media accounts. These law-abiding citizens were investigated over a couple of messages posted in their WhatsApp group whereby some dared to say they would prefer another military regime to the return of the far-left candidate Lula da Silva to the presidency. Justice Moraes then immediately ordered all their bank accounts blocked.
So similar to the US in 2020. Then a day or two ago agent-provocateurs turned the peaceful protests against the election rigging into crazy violent protest, triggering mass arrests and the state to take emergency measures to “protect democracy.” Just like Jan 6 in the US.
As in the US, no attempt was made to persuade the electorate that the vote was fair by investigation of the numerous reports of irregularities. Instead, there was just endless assertion from the media and winners that it was fair. Color me unconvinced.
It’s the new leftist playbook. So transparent.
