Claims About Lula, Cristiano Zanin and Brazil's Election Integrity

Would Lula have won the presidential elections in Brazil if he had actually played by the rules?

We might never know. But what we do know is that the legitimacy and integrity of the presidential elections in Brazil, um, was compromised.

We know this because Cristiano Zanin, a personal, uh, defense lawyer of Lu- Lula, who had defended him in corruption cases and who happened to be conveniently sitting on the Federal Supreme Court, intervened at five oh one in the election, signing an order to extend voting by two hours, even though the polls had closed at five PM.

This is a clear conflict of interest, a blatant conflict of interest.

He had defended him as his lawyer in corruption cases, and now he was making an intervention that could shape the future of the election.

A second fun fact is that he bypassed the Superior Electoral Court, which has responsibility for safeguarding the integrity of the election.

A third fact is that this particular intervention was unprecedented, and the president of the Superior Electoral Court highlighted the fact that the intervention could compromise the integrity of the election, um, could undermine its legitimacy, could interfere with proper procedure,

and that it caused significant difficulty to electoral officials because some stations, polling stations, had already closed and could no longer, um, extend their hours. Others were able to extend hours.

So you had this patchwork kind of effect where some stations stayed open, others did not. Secondly, the voting count had to be suspended because they had already started transmitting the results from some of the polling stations, and this counting process had to be suspended for two hours.

And so what happened to those two hours?

Did that open up an opportunity to tamper with the voting process?

Could it have? Is it technologically possible that during those two hours the, the results were manipulated?

Who knows? I'm not sure if it was technically feasible to do so.

There are people who believe it was feasible.

But the point is that that extension of the voting by two hours and that suspension of the voting count, ordered by the personal former defense lawyer of Lula, represents a clear conflict of interest and represents a partisan intervention in the election,

and an intervention that is highly irregular and disrupts, uh, the whole electoral process in an unprecedented So please don't, don't tell me that these actions by the Supreme Court that bypass the Superior Electoral Court,

um, are justified by concerns over people not being able to vote.

Not everything is justified by people not being able to vote.

You cannot interfere with an electoral process in any way you like, uh, in order to allow more people to vote.

That is not a justification. It has to be done using proper procedure.

So now there's going to be a cloud over Lula's presidency for the entire duration of the presidency because a lot of people are going to wonder, would he have been elected if proper procedures had been followed?