43% of Brazilians Distrust Electronic Voting, Poll Shows

Three years after mobs stormed Brazil’s seat of government demanding the military overturn an election, the distrust that fueled those riots is far from extinguished. A Genial/Quaest poll released this Sunday found that 43% of Brazilians say they do not believe electronic voting machines are reliable — a startling figure for a system used since 1996 with no proven case of fraud.

A slim majority of 53% said they trust the machines, while 3% offered no opinion. The survey of 2,004 respondents, conducted February 5–9, carries a 95% confidence level. What the headline numbers obscure is how cleanly the divide tracks with partisan loyalty.

Among those who voted for Bolsonaro in 2022, 69% expressed distrust, versus just 26% who trust the system. The mirror image held for Lula voters: 75% trust the machines, 22% do not. Self-identified leftists showed the highest confidence (82%), while Bolsonaro loyalists registered the deepest skepticism (77%). Even among independents, trust prevailed — 55% to 41% — but the margin was thin. Evangelical voters, a core Bolsonaro constituency, leaned toward distrust at 52%.

The numbers are a direct inheritance of the campaign Bolsonaro waged against the electoral system. Starting in 2021, he repeatedly alleged fraud without evidence and pushed Congress to mandate paper ballot receipts — a proposal the lower house rejected. In July 2022, he summoned foreign ambassadors to cast doubt on the machines. After losing by fewer than two percentage points, his party challenged second-round results at the electoral court, which rejected the suit and imposed a R$22.7 million ($3.8 million) fine. Weeks later, on January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters ransacked Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace. Bolsonaro was convicted last year and is now serving a 27-year sentence.

The electoral court maintains that the machines carry 30 layers of security, operate entirely offline, and are audited through public source-code inspections every election year. No investigation — including by the military, the Federal Police, or independent auditors — has ever substantiated the fraud claims. Yet with 2026 approaching and Bolsonaro’s son Flávio already running as his political heir, the poll suggests that distrust in the voting system has hardened into a durable feature of Brazilian politics rather than a passing episode.

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