The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE), Brazil's top electoral court, has called false Senator Flávio Bolsonaro's (PL) claim that his party's observers were removed from the court's vault room during the second-round count. The response came in a statement issued on Monday morning and posted on the court's "Fato ou boato" ("Fact or rumour") page, where the Justiça Eleitoral (the electoral justice system) publishes official clarifications.
What the court said
The denial rests on two points. The first is that the vault room is not an area open to anyone wishing to watch the count: "A sala-cofre do TSE não é um espaço aberto à visitação" — the TSE's vault room is not a space open to visitors — the statement says. Party observers, international observers, lawyers and prosecutors follow the tabulation and the release of results in a different area, the Tabulation Room.
The second is the record of where the PL observers actually were. According to the court, two of them passed through the TSE on Sunday: they attended the voting-machine integrity test in the basement of the headquarters in Brasília, and they were in the Tabulation Room and in the Political Parties Room on the fifth floor. The TSE says attendance records and footage from the Tabulation Room show the observers had "free access" to the court's facilities.
The distinction the court draws is between two rooms with different jobs: the vault room houses the infrastructure on which the result is processed and has never received visitors, while the Tabulation Room exists precisely so that outside monitors can follow the process. By the court's account, nobody was removed because nobody had been let in.
What Flávio Bolsonaro said
The senator spoke to reporters shortly after the TSE recognised the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), elected with 51.79% of valid votes and a margin of roughly 4.4 million votes over his rival. Bolsonaro said the observers were taken out of the vault room "a partir do momento em que essa eleição foi tomada" — from the moment this election was seized — and argued that a great deal would have to be cleared up before the country accepted what he called a "sacanagem", a dirty trick, in this year's vote. In the same remarks he announced he would ask for the election to be annulled and said it was "impossível", impossible, for him to accept defeat.
By late Monday morning his campaign had not filed any court action against the result, according to the legal news outlet ConJur.
The background
The dispute over the count follows a decision by Justice Cristiano Zanin of the Supremo Tribunal Federal (Supreme Federal Court), who shortly before polls were due to close at 5pm on Sunday extended voting until 7pm nationwide. The extension had been requested both by the coalition backing Lula, "Brasil Pronto Pra Mais", and by Bolsonaro's own campaign, which asked the TSE for it.
With information from Agência Brasil and ConJur.
