Brazil's presidential runoff ended Sunday with no result in sight. Cristiano Zanin, a justice of the Supremo Tribunal Federal (Supreme Federal Court), extended voting until 7 p.m. in every polling station in the country — two hours beyond the 5 p.m. close set in law — and the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (Superior Electoral Court) interrupted the vote tally shortly after it had started publishing it.
When publication stopped, the court had counted 0.25% of the ballot boxes. In that minimal sample, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) had 57.66% of valid votes, or 193,574 votes, and Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) had 42.34%, or 142,169 votes. Those figures come from a little over a thousand of the roughly 499,000 machines used in the runoff, and will not support any reading of a trend.
The request came out of Salvador's bus service
The injunction answered a petition from Lula's campaign that reached the Supreme Court at 4:32 p.m., less than half an hour before voting was due to close. The complaint concerned bus service in Salvador, Feira de Santana and Lauro de Freitas, in the state of Bahia, and argued that voters had been prevented from reaching their polling stations.
Zanin cited "the gravity of the facts described" and the "evident urgency" of the measure, and extended the deadline not only in Bahia but across the whole country. The decision came around 5 p.m., according to the timestamps on live coverage.
Shortly before that, Lula's coalition had already asked the electoral court for an extension in ten states — São Paulo, Bahia, Paraíba, Piauí, Paraná, Pará, Rio de Janeiro, Alagoas, Pernambuco and Roraima — all over transport problems. Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign, in turn, asked for extra time in 17 municipalities in São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina, and cited bad weather in Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul. The PL also asked that the presidential result be withheld until voting had closed in the stations covered by any extension.
The electoral prosecution service objected
Prosecutors took the opposite position. The deputy electoral prosecutor general, Alexandre Espinosa, told the electoral court that the statutory closing time "must remain unchanged" and that the complaints should be investigated without altering the voting timetable. The extension was granted anyway, by a single justice at the Supreme Court rather than by the electoral court.
The electoral court's president, Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, had said hours earlier that he did not rule out extending voting in Bahia and that he was not acting on his own initiative in the matter. The court then confirmed that it had halted the release of results, without saying when the tally would resume.
Who gets the two extra hours
The extension does not reopen polling stations. The regional electoral court of Rio Grande do Sul said it would not reopen sections already closed at 5 p.m.: the extra time applies to stations still operating when the order arrived — in practice, those with voters still queuing, who are entitled to cast their ballots.
Also at 5:31 p.m., the electoral authorities summoned the São Paulo city government to explain a complaint that it had cut the city's bus fleet.
The scoreline the night will undo
The runoff repeats the 4 October first round, when Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead with 47.03% of valid votes, or 56,104,503 ballots, against 45.16% and 53,879,538 for Lula. Turnout in the first round was 78.92% of an electorate of 158,745,502.
The gap of barely two points between the two in the first round is why the sample released before the pause says so little: the first machines to reach the national tally tend to come from small municipalities and from states in the North and Northeast, and do not mirror the distribution of the electorate. What that first 0.25% measures is the order in which votes enter the system, not the country's preference.
With information from the Supremo Tribunal Federal, the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, InfoMoney, Bloomberg Línea, Money Times and Exame.
