The electoral colleges of Brazil opened this Sunday for the elections presidential, legislative and regionalin which the former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva appears as a favorite in all the polls against the current ruler, Jair Bolsonaro.
(Read here: Brazil votes today under a climate of polarization and the specter of violence)
On this day, which began at 8 am (local time) and will close at 5 pm (local time), some 156.4 million voters are called to elect the president, the 27 governors, the 513 deputies, to a third of the Senate and to renew the representatives in the regional legislative assemblies.
(See also: Lula da Silva and Bolsonaro face each other this Sunday at the polls)
Once the polling stations close across the country, which for the first time will take place on a unified schedule, the Superior Electoral Court will begin to spread the first bulletins with official results.
Predictably the count will be completed in a few hours, thanks to the electronic voting system used in Brazil since 1996 and whose reliability has been called into question by Bolsonaro, despite the fact that there has never been any suspicion of fraud.
According to the latest polls, released on Saturday, Lula has a clear advantage of fourteen percentage points over Bolsonaroand would receive between 50% and 51% of the valid votes projected by the two most reputable demographic companies in the country.
In the event that none of the candidates reaches more than half of the valid votes, the two most voted will have to face each other in a second round scheduled for October 30.
Voters will be able to exercise their right to vote in the 5,570 municipalities throughout the territory, the Federal District of Brasilia and the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, as well as 181 locations abroad.
The nearly half a million electronic ballot boxes installed in the country will once again have an extensive security device, reinforced with Army troops, which will be present in 568 municipalities, mainly in the Amazon region and in some cities with high rates of violence, such as Rio de Janeiro.
This year’s elections, the most polarized since Brazil regained democracy in 1985, have been characterized by a climate of tension between Lula and Bolsonaro, a dispute that spread to his followers, with some cases of attacks and deaths motivated by arguments. policies.
The details of the day of the presidential elections in Brazil
Bolsonaro speaks
The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, said this Sunday that “clean elections must be respected” when voting in Rio de Janeiro in the first round of the presidential elections, and wished that “the best win.”
The current president and candidate, who is second in the polls, has questioned the reliability of Brazil’s electoral system, raising fears that he will not accept an eventual defeat against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The former president and candidate for the elections in Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva voted this Sunday and said he wants to win so that Brazil “returns to normality”.
I am “voting here with the possibility of becoming president again, to try to get this country back to normal.”
“We don’t want any more hate or discord,” the leader of the left said when voting in Sao Bernardo do Campo, in the Sao Paulo metropolitan region.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With AFP and Efe
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