Brazil’s top electoral authority has launched a counter-offensive against Jair Bolsonaro’s Donald Trump-style campaign against the country’s voting system by announcing it will investigate his potentially criminal propagation of groundless vote-rigging claims. Bolsonaro has stepped up his long-running crusade against Brazil’s electronic voting system in recent weeks, apparently hoping to energize supporters at a time when his ratings are plunging over his handling of a Covid outbreak that has killed nearly 560,000 Brazilians. “There’s no way of proving whether the elections were rigged or not,” Bolsonaro conceded during the rambling two-hour broadcast. In an editorial, the Rio broadsheet O Globo praised efforts to combat Bolsonaro’s crusade against Brazil’s internationally celebrated electronic voting system, which it called “nothing more than an attack on democracy”. Brazil’s electronic voting system was implemented in 1996 and has been widely praised for helping eliminate fraud and accelerate election results in a vast country more than 2.5 times larger than India.

Source: The Guardian August 03, 2021 16:04 UTC