By Lise Alves, Senior Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The electronic ballot machines are one-hundred percent reliable, assured Brazil’s newly appointed Supreme Court (STF) Chief Justice, Jose Antonio Dias Toffoli rebutting suspicions raised by presidential frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro that if the PT party (Workers’ Party) candidate were to win the elections it would be due to electronic voting fraud.
“Regarding this (suspicion), all I have to say is that he (Bolsonaro) was always elected using the electronic ballot box,” Dias Toffoli said during a press conference on Monday.
“The systems are open for auditing to all political parties six months before the election, to all candidates and to the Brazilian Bar Association,” said the STF president.
On Sunday, September 16th, during a live broadcast through his social media channel, Jair Bolsonaro said that the possibility of losing the election ‘in a fraudulent manner’ to PT candidate Fernando Haddad is ‘concrete’.
“The PT has discovered the path to power: electronic voting,” said right-wing candidate Bolsonaro from his hospital bed in São Paulo. Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach region on September 6tht while on a campaign rally in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais.
Since then the 63-year-old former military official has undergone several operations to repair his intestines.
According to the most recent opinion polls from BGT Pactual, Bolsonaro leads this year’s presidential race 30 percent of voter intention, followed by the PT candidate, Fernando Haddad with 12 percent.
With less than twenty days before first round of elections, analysts say that although Bolsonaro has a wide lead in relation to the second placed candidate, it is unlikely he will obtain 50 percent plus one of the votes needed to win in the first round.
The most likely scenario, say political analysts, is that the two most voted candidates face off in a second round on October 28th.
The battle in the first round, therefore, is to see who will run against Bolsonaro in the second round. The two candidates most likely to occupy that slot are left-wing candidates: ex-president Lula’s candidate, Fernando Haddad, or former Ceara state governor, Ciro Gomes.