Nearly double Lula's victory margin. Justice Cristiano Zanin, a former lawyer for Lula, extended voting hours in the final hour — a decision that is now at the center of a growing controversy.
BRASÍLIA — According to data from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE), 8.6 million votes were cast without recognized biometric identification in the second round of the 2022 presidential election — a figure nearly double the 4.43 million margin by which Lula defeated Jair Bolsonaro.
Justice Cristiano Zanin, a Supreme Court appointee and former personal lawyer for Lula, ordered the voting period extended until 7 p.m., after it had already closed at 5 p.m. The extension was granted in the final minutes of the second round, allowing voters who had not yet closed their polling stations to cast their ballots.
TSE log data shows roughly 34,000 votes were cast after 5 p.m. under this exception. While the procedure is technically provided for by electoral rules, the volume and the unusual timing of the Supreme Court’s intervention have sparked a wave of criticism from legal scholars, lawmakers, and opposition figures.
According to the TSE, biometric identification failed for 6.7% of voters who already had their fingerprints registered in the system. In those cases, electoral workers were authorized to allow voting through alternative identification — a process that, by design, does not leave the same auditable trail.
Why it matters
The number is not a theoretical concern. In an election decided by 4.43 million votes, 8.6 million unverified ballots mean the margin is mathematically smaller than the number of votes that cannot be fully traced to a specific registered voter. Election integrity analysts argue that without full biometric verification, the chain of custody from voter to tally is incomplete.
Brazil’s electoral authorities maintain that the system worked as designed and that no fraud has been proven. Critics counter that “no fraud proven” is a different claim from “fraud is impossible,” and that the burden of transparency in a democratic election should fall on the state, not on citizens trying to reconstruct the record after the fact.
The Zanin decision
The decision to extend voting came from Justice Cristiano Zanin, who was appointed to the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) by President Lula after representing Lula personally in the long-running “Lava Jato” criminal cases. His confirmation to the court was controversial for exactly this reason — Zanin ruled on an electoral matter directly involving the man who nominated him, in an election Lula was running to win.
No major Brazilian outlet with reach in the United States has reported this story in English. The Watch Post Daily publishes it to make the record available to American readers who care about the state of democracy across the Americas.
Sources: Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) polling station reports; Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) public records.
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