Official TSE numbers in Campos dos Goytacazes show Lula's runoff gains came almost entirely from third-party voters, under a last-minute court order from Justice Zanin that extended voting after many polls had closed.
CAMPOS DOS GOYTACAZES, Brazil — Official numbers from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) show a swing in this Rio de Janeiro city that mirrors a pattern seen across the country in the October 25 runoff: Flavio Bolsonaro (PL) lost ground from the first round, and Lula (PT) surged. The math checks out. In the first round on October 4, Flavio took 160,859 votes (59.10% of valid votes) to Lula’s 91,105 (33.47%). Three weeks later, Flavio slipped to 159,470 (57.91%) while Lula jumped to 115,927 (42.09%) — a net move of roughly 1,389 votes lost for Flavio against 24,822 gained for Lula, numbers that line up with where first-round third-party votes went. The TSE’s own ballot logs don’t show a single phantom vote. The arithmetic is clean.
What isn’t clean is the process around it. The runoff in Campos, like dozens of other cities, saw a near-total transfer of third-party voters straight to Lula. It also happened under an unprecedented order from Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin, who extended voting hours nationwide until 7 p.m. — signed after 5 p.m., once many polling stations had already closed for the day. Zanin acted on a request from Lula’s own campaign, with a narrower, parallel request from Flavio’s side. Poll workers and observers in Campos described confusion on the ground: ballot boxes already collected, gates shut, no clear guidance on what came next.
Why it matters: this is the second presidential election in a row where the losing side in a key region is raising questions about how votes were counted, not whether they were counted. For American readers, that distinction matters because Brazil and the United States are the hemisphere’s two largest democracies, and intelligence-sharing, trade and migration flows all run through whoever holds power in Brasilia. A ruling party that wins a disputed runoff and then moves fast to silence the people asking questions about it is not a domestic footnote — it’s a preview of how institutional capture plays out when courts, not voters, get the last word.
Independent verification: the TSE confirms ballot tallies match official totals and says fingerprint identification still requires photo ID as backup. Nationally, 8,632,488 voters — 6.73% of runoff turnout — cast ballots without a fingerprint match, a drop from 2022 but still a large number against a national margin of about 4.4 million votes. That part is documented and on the record. What remains unverified, and unaddressed by either the TSE or the Supreme Court, is why a court order extending voting hours arrived after polls had already closed in large parts of the country, and why no independent audit of the last-minute transfer pattern has been ordered.
None of this proves a rigged outcome in Campos dos Goytacazes on its own. What it proves is that Brazil’s electoral institutions keep producing results that are numerically consistent and procedurally murky in the same breath — and that the people demanding answers about that gap are increasingly the ones facing legal risk, not the officials who signed off on the irregularities.
The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sourcing: Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) official results, Campos dos Goytacazes municipal data, poll worker and observer accounts from the October 25 runoff.
Featured image: ballot box, photo by planet_fox on Pixabay, licensed for commercial use with no attribution required.
COMMENTS