RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – President Jair Bolsonaro followed with joy the news about the presidential election in France, but not because of the result that saw Emmanuel Macron ahead of patriotic Marine Len Pen in the first round last weekend, but because of the French vote on paper.
“Congratulations to France,” Bolsonaro said in his weekly Livestream Thursday (14), holding up a printout of a photo showing a glass ballot box with scraps of paper. “A country much more developed than us is voting on paper. What an example for us Brazilians,” Bolsonaro commented, again railing against Brazil’s electronic voting system.
“Here there are people who say, ‘My system is sacrosanct,’ but when the army presents proposals to improve the system, people stamp it as ‘confidential’ and say you can’t show everything that’s there because some hacker might get in. So the ballot box is not sacrosanct, it can be infiltrated,” said the president of the republic, who recalled the involvement of the armed forces in the talks with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).
“There is a meeting between the technical team of the armed forces and the TSE, and I hope there will be a debate between the technicians. We have the Cyber Defense Command, which is composed of military officers from the three armed forces who study cyber warfare and the Internet in-depth. I am sure that we will reach an agreement…. and, to be very clear, the Armed Forces do not interfere with the TSE. It was the TSE that invited the armed forces to participate in the electoral system,” Bolsonaro said.
“The votes that are transmitted to Brasilia go to a secret room. The counting is supposed to be public, but it goes into a secret room. Let it continue to go to the secret room, except that the same channel that leads to a secret room will lead to another open room where the Armed Forces are, the CGU, OAB, and about ten other entities that were also invited by the then President TSE, Minister [Luis Roberto] Barroso,” Bolsonaro said.
“We have everything to hold peaceful elections, without problems, only with technical issues. There will be no printed vote, but a paper vote,” he concluded.