by WorldTribune Staff, October 26, 2026 — Real World News
Brazil’s presidential election could be annulled, according to a report by The New York Times.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was declared the winner of Sunday’s election, defeating conservative challenger Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was declared the winner over Flavio Bolsonaro in Sunday’s presidential election in Brazil.
Now, according to the New York Times, election lawyers are raising serious questions about what happened, including whether voting irregularities could provide grounds to annul the entire election.
The original time for polls closing was 5 p.m., but Justice Cristiano Zanin, who was appointed by Lula, gave the order extending voting until 7 p.m. That order arrived after many election workers had finished shutting everything down.
Human Events editor Jack Posobiec posted on social media: “A judge loyal to Lula ordered voting extended — a result like this in Brazil is unprecedented.”
Now, many are questioning whether voters across the country had the same opportunity to cast their ballots.
The president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, Judge Kassio Nunes Marques, issued a devastating warning:
“There was absolutely no rule that allowed extending the voting by two hours.”
It was an unprecedented order from a Supreme Court magistrate allied with Lula, which ended up benefiting his regions.
“There were no regulations that authorized any extension,” Nunes Marques stated. “Never, in the entire history of the TSE, has there been an extension.”
He also warned that it was materially impossible, in just a few hours, to guarantee that a judicial decision of that magnitude would not cause side effects — especially technological ones — capable of significantly altering the vote count.
And he concluded with a forceful reminder to the Supreme Court: the Constitution assigns exclusive jurisdiction to the Electoral Court to direct the electoral process.
“This is an extremely serious, critical situation,” electoral lawyer Priscilla Sodre Pereira told the Times.
When Zanin made the last-minute decision to extend voting hours, some polling stations had already closed and shut down their voting machines. They could not reopen.
“Fernando Neisser, an electoral law professor at Fundacao Getulio Vargas, a Brazilian research institute, said the election could be annulled if the margin is very narrow and it is shown that polling stations stayed open longer in areas that strongly favor one candidate,” the NYT reported.
In the first round of voting, Bolsonaro beat Lula by more than 2 million votes and several polls had him way ahead going into Sunday’s runoff. Lula’s supposed “comeback” was a major red flag and an upset.
The Times reported:
Digging into tonight’s numbers, Lula’s comeback is remarkable. After finishing behind in the first round, few pollsters expected him to turn things around. Most assumed that voters whose preferred candidates had been eliminated would break for Flavio Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff. But that’s not what happened.
There were about 14 million additional votes up for grabs in the runoff, including those of new voters, supporters of eliminated candidates and people who had cast blank or invalid ballots in the first round.
Lula captured three out of every four of those votes, a stunning turnaround. He gained 10.4 million votes between the first and second rounds, compared with just 3.7 million for Bolsonaro.
Revolver News noted: “This reminds many people of the 80 million votes Biden laughingly claims he received.”
Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party has two possible paths to challenge the result, said Raquel Machado, a professor at the Federal University of Ceara.
It could seek a technical audit to determine whether unequal voting conditions affected the outcome, potentially leading to the election’s annulment. Or it could pursue an abuse-of-power case through the Superior Electoral Court’s inspector general, which could disqualify the Lula-Alckmin ticket even after it takes office.
Steve Bannon said on his War Room broadcast that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio need to come down hard on Brazil:
