“Even before all these circumstances, we took all the necessary measures and were entirely successful. I repeat: there was no change resulting from the court ruling,” Nunes Marques said The president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, Kassio Nunes Marques, who was appointed to the Supreme Federal Court by former president Jair Bolsonaro in 2020, said on Monday that the extension of voting hours did not change the result of the runoff won by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s son, had cited the extension in refusing to recognise his defeat and calling for the election to be annulled.
“Even before all these circumstances, we took all the necessary measures and were entirely successful. I repeat: there was no change resulting from the court ruling,” Nunes Marques told a press conference.
On Sunday night, Bolsonaro called it “unacceptable” that Supreme Court Judge Cristiano Zanin, whom he called “Lula’s lawyer” for having defended him in the Lava Jato cases, ordered at 5.01 p.m., when polls were due to close, an extension of voting until 7 p.m. “There is a lot to clarify before Brazil recognises this outrage that has just happened,” he said. “I will never know how many votes I could have had.”
Zanin ordered the extension at the request of Lula’s coalition, which reported a lack of buses to carry voters in cities such as Salvador and São Paulo. Bolsonaro’s campaign, for its part, had asked the electoral courts to extend voting in municipalities affected by rain, flooding and power cuts in states such as Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul. The measure applied only to polling stations still open; those that had closed at 5 p.m. did not reopen and followed the usual counting procedure.
Lula won with 51.78% of valid votes against Bolsonaro’s 48.22%, a margin of about 4.4 million votes. There is no record yet of the senator’s campaign having filed a formal challenge.