What Bolsonaro said at the meeting with ambassadors in 2022 – 06/20/2023 – Politics

The content and circumstances of the meeting with ambassadors held by then-president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) last year is at the heart of the electoral action that will begin to be judged by the Electoral Justice this Thursday (22nd) and that could make him ineligible for eight years.

At the time, less than three months before the first round, Bolsonaro made false and distorted statements about the electoral process, claiming to be based on official data, in addition to seeking to discredit ministers of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court).

See below some of Bolsonaro’s speeches at the meeting.

2018 elections

Early on, Bolsonaro says he would base his speech on a Federal Police investigation into a hacker attack on the TSE in 2018. “Everything I’m going to say here is documented, nothing in my head.” According to Bolsonaro, the TSE itself would have said that the 2018 results may have been changed.

“We cannot face elections under the cover of mistrust. We want to make sure that for whom the voter voted, the vote goes to that person exactly. The TSE itself says that in 2018 numbers may have changed”, he said.

“I understand that we could not have had elections in 2020 without a full investigation of what happened inside. Because the system is completely vulnerable, according to the TSE itself, and obviously the conclusion of the Federal Police”, he said.

What is the inquiry cited by Bolsonaro at the meeting?

The investigation cited by Bolsonaro began in November 2018 after the court called the PF. Excerpts from that same survey had been read by Bolsonaro almost a year earlier, in August 2021, in an interview with Rádio Jovem Pan and released on his social networks. Bolsonaro became the target of an investigation for the alleged leak of classified information. The Attorney General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, saw no crime in the conduct.

At the time, the court released a note in which it stated that the investigated attack “did not pose any risk to the integrity of the 2018 elections”. In addition, delegate Victor Campos, until then responsible for the investigation, responded in a statement that he had not identified in the file any element that would allow him to state that there was manipulation of votes or fraud in any election.

Use of the Armed Forces

In an alarmist tone, Bolsonaro criticized the TSE, saying that the court rejected proposals from the Armed Forces for the electoral process. “What do we want? Peace, tranquility. Now, why would a group of three people just want to bring instability to our country? They won’t accept anything,” he said.

According to Bolsonaro, the military worked on “suggestions so that what happened in the 2018 elections would not happen again”. He also said that all of them could be fulfilled by October 2.

Some of the military’s suggestions had been rejected by the court, while some had already been accepted. In addition, there were proposals that, according to the TSE, would be analyzed for the following elections, as was the case with other entities that participated in the court’s Transparency Commission. The military even made suggestions to the TSE even a week before the first round.

vote count

Bolsonaro takes out of context and distorts the speech of a TSE employee about the 2020 elections, to claim that it would not be the court that totaled the votes.

“It’s not the TSE that counts the votes, it’s a third-party company. I don’t think I needed to continue this explanation here”, said Bolsonaro. “We are fighting to present a way out of all this. We want trust and transparency in the Brazilian electoral system”.

According to the TSE report, the aggregation of results is carried out by the court, as well as the development of the aggregation system. The company Oracle is contracted to supply the server (supercomputer), which is physically located at the TSE, and the database management system, which is administered by the TSE team.

Discreditation of audits

Bolsonaro said that “it is impossible to audit elections here in Brazil” and also questioned what election observers from other countries would do in the country, claiming that the system would be auditable. “What do these people come to do in Brazil? What do they come to observe? That voting is fully computerized. Do they come to appear legal? Do they come to say that everything happened normally?”, He said.

The electoral process has a series of auditing and inspection stages, open to entities and parties and starting one year before the election. Regarding the international observers, the TSE stated at the time that the international observers had already started a technical analysis of the electoral system, and that experts would have access to “the source code and all the necessary elements to assess the transparency and integrity of the system”.