PT Elected Zero Federal Deputies in Seven States — Yet Lula Carried Some of Them

BRASILIA — The Workers’ Party failed to elect a single federal deputy in seven Brazilian states in last month’s general election, according to a state-by-state tally published Sunday by Jornal da Cidade Online: Acre, Alagoas, Amapá, Amazonas, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins. In those same seven states, the outlet reports, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva polled well at the top of the ballot — and in some of them he won.

One ballot, one machine, two lines: in seven states the presidential line delivered for the ruling party and the legislative line delivered nothing. Nobody in Brasília has explained how the same voter, in the same sitting, produced both numbers.

Brazilians cast both votes on the same day, on the same electronic machine, in the same sitting: president first, then federal deputy. There is no separate ballot, no second line, no second trip to the polling station. What the tally describes, then, is a party that carried the presidential vote in states where it could not place one single name in the Chamber of Deputies — not one of 513 seats, across seven federal units, for the party that owns the presidency.

Why it matters

Voters split tickets everywhere, and Brazil’s open-list system has never translated a presidential vote mechanically into a legislative one. The question critics are raising is not whether a gap can exist. It is whether a gap this complete — zero seats in seven states for the winning president’s own party, in states he carried — is explained by voter behavior alone, and why no institution in Brasília treats the question as worth auditing in public.

For American readers the stakes are concrete. Brazil is the largest democracy in the hemisphere after the United States, it votes on a fully electronic system with no voter-marked paper record, and its government sets the terms for migration, trade and intelligence cooperation across South America. A count that cannot be independently reconstructed in Brazil is a count Washington has to take on faith.

The record

The seven-state result is a reading of the official returns, not an allegation: the seats were awarded, and the PT took none of them in Acre, Alagoas, Amapá, Amazonas, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins. The claim that the divergence between the presidential and legislative lines points to manipulation remains an allegation, advanced by analysts and opposition figures and rejected by the Superior Electoral Court, which certified the result and maintains that the machines are auditable and that no fraud has been demonstrated.

What has not happened is a public, ballot-level audit of that divergence. This is the same gap The Watch Post Daily documented when the numbers in Campos dos Goytacazes added up while the process behind them did not, and when a PT-branded truck was caught transporting ballot boxes in the Federal District and the electoral court conceded the irregularity without reopening anything. It is also the pattern that led President Trump to call the election rigged days after the runoff.

The seven states do not prove fraud, and this newspaper does not claim they do. They do establish something the ruling party has not answered: the government’s own electoral base, in the regions where it says it is strongest, produced no representation at all. In any other democracy that result would send auditors to the data. In Brazil it sends the people who ask to court — which is why the question keeps returning, and why the answer keeps being a prosecution instead of a recount.

Sources: Jornal da Cidade Online, “Os 7 estados em que o PT ‘zerou’ sua bancada na Câmara” (Nov. 1, 2026); official Superior Electoral Court returns; prior Watch Post Daily reporting. The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story.

Featured image: Plenário da Câmara dos Deputados, Sessão Deliberativa Extraordinária by Pablo Valadares / Câmara dos Deputados, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 3.0.