Nunes Marques and Araújo were the only ones to vote in favor of Bolsonaro

Minister Nunes Marques voted this Friday (30) for the dismissal of the PDT action against the ticket of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and Walter Braga Netto (PL) in the 2022 elections, joining the dissenting vote of Minister Raul Araújo. The judgment, however, determined the ineligibility of the former president for eight years, with the votes of five ministers: Alexandre de Moraes, Cármen Lúcia, André Ramos Tavares and Floriano de Azevedo.

Nunes Marques considered it incorrect to impute the seriousness of Bolsonaro’s act as an abuse against the legitimacy and normality of elections and as equivalent to the previous case that led to the impeachment of deputy Fernando Francischini (União Brasil-PR) in 2021. “Bolsonaro’s event was the only of the type it had in the election year and involved a restricted audience and a speech filled with questionable facts, but without citing specific cases”, he said.

Nunes Marques previously ruled out the involvement of the government news agency as a collaborator in possible Bolsonaro mistakes in the meeting with ambassadors. In favor of the former president, he also said that the TSE had already evaluated a similar case involving the Dilma-Temer ticket, in 2017. He also excluded Braga Netto from the scope of the action.

The minister tried to show that the debate around the reliability of the electronic voting system “is as old as the ballot box itself”. He stated that Bolsonaro had long been showing his displeasure with the lack of physical proof of the vote. “And not even the former president was the biggest critic of the system over three decades, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB),” he said.

The minister also made a vehement defense of the electronic ballot box, as being a “symbol of Brazilian democracy” and pride of the Electoral Justice, to later say that the judgment did not deal with the subject itself, but with possible illicit acts by Bolsonaro.