Brazil's military finds no issues with election that Bolsonaro lost

A long-awaited report by Brazil's armed forces on the security of the country's electronic voting system has not mentioned any specific problems with last month's vote but said there were vulnerabilities in the code that could potentially be exploited.

The report is the fruit of efforts by President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who lost his re-election bid to leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to get the military to identify problems with a voting system that he alleges – without proof – is liable to fraud.

The military's findings may provide fodder for a small but committed protest movement among Bolsonaro's supporters who refuse to accept Lula's October 30 victory and have asked the armed forces to intervene.

Lula, a former president who takes office again on January 1, told journalists on Wednesday that the protesters had no reason to question the result of the election, saying those funding the protests should be investigated.

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'Relevant risk'

In a letter to Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who heads Brazil's top electoral authority (TSE), Defence Minister Paulo Nogueira did not cite any specific problems found in the military audit of the vote.

But he wrote that voting machines' "connection to the internet, during the compilation of the source code and consequent generation of programmes, may configure a relevant risk to the security of the process."

He added that "from the functionality tests ... it is not possible to say that the electronic voting system is free from the influence of any malicious code that could alter its functioning."

To resolve the two problems he mentioned, he suggested the TSE consider creating a specialised commission to comb through the election results for any sign of issues flagged in the military report.

Bolsonaro's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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