Vote buying in the Brazil election

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Vote buying in the Brazil election

Leonardo Sakamoto writes about Brazil’s vote-buying scandals.

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Flickr: Jeso Carneiro

Brazil’s very close general elections finished at the end of October 2022. There was a big increase in voter harassment and trying to buy workers’ votes. The Public Labour Prosecution Office receives this type of complaint. It received 2,549 complaints, up from 212 in the 2018 elections. Nearly all were complaints about employers – from multinational companies to small businesses. The complaints were about harassing or bribing their employees to vote for president Jair Bolsonaro. He lost the election by less than two percentage points to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party.

In the state of Pará, the owner of a brick and tile company promised $40 for each worker’s vote if Bolsonaro was re-elected. The Public Labour Prosecution Office made the owner of the company pay a fine and apologise for his offer in public. In Bahia, a businessman from agriculture asked, on video, for other rural producers to take away the jobs of employees if they voted for Lula. The businessman had to pay compensation and apologise. A luxury boat manufacturer in Santa Catarina state agreed with the Public Labour Prosecution Office to pay nearly $60,000 in compensation for harassing its employees to vote for Bolsonaro.

Voter manipulation has a long history in Brazil. During the late 19th and early 20th century, local people with power, known as ‘colonels’ - they were not members of the military – guaranteed votes for their candidates by the use of favours, threats, and violence.

Today, ‘digital colonels’ often use messaging apps and social media to promise favours and make threats with possible violence. Many think that vote buying increased during the election because of the actions of president Bolsonaro. From the start of the election campaign, Jair Bolsonaro’s government suddenly gave $4 billion to poor voters. This use of the government machine to influence poor voters made it OK for employers to do the same thing.

Employers did not only offer bribes and favours to workers, they also took their voter documents and forced them to carry cameras to record the button they pressed on electronic voting machines. They also tried to stop them from going to voting stations on election day.

It’s a terrible form of political manipulation and it doesn’t matter if it is a big or small business. The power imbalance is the same. Workers depend on their jobs to live and the businesses know that and play with that fear.

The president of the Superior Electoral Court, Chief Justice Alexandre de Moraes, reminded the nation that such activity is a crime and that ‘in the 21st century, people can’t try to force workers to vote in a certain way’.

They can’t, but they did.

NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:

https://newint.org/features/2022/12/05/view-brazil

(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)