00:00This Sunday, millions of Brazilians vote in a runoff election that will decide the country's
00:05future. The contest pits incumbent President Lula da Silva against far-right candidate
00:11Flavio Bolsonaro. Brian Muir, our correspondent in Sao Paulo, has more details at this hour.
00:17Go ahead, Brian. Pleasure to meet you again. Hey, Alejandra. How's it going? Well,
00:22basically, this has been a very unusual election day because as the afternoon went on,
00:31there were growing complaints from several locations across Brazil, including Sao Paulo
00:37and Salvador, the first and sixth largest cities in the country, respectively, that in poor
00:43neighborhoods, buses weren't running to take people to the voting centers. In fact, it was verified that
00:49in Sao Paulo, the mayor pulled 40% of the entire bus fleet off of the road today on a
00:56day in which
00:56the buses were supposed to be free. And in Salvador, 30%, some 30% were pulled off of the road.
01:03So,
01:03the Workers' Party and its coalition partners issued requests to arrest the Transportation
01:09Secretary of Sao Paulo and the Transportation Secretary of Sao Paulo, especially in the case
01:15of Sao Paulo. The government of Sao Paulo had already received a judicial order requiring them to
01:21guarantee that 100% of the buses would run today. And it was disregarded. So, as growing complaints
01:29reached the superior electoral card, chief justice or president of the superior electoral card,
01:36Casio Nunes Marquez, who was a Jair Bolsonaro appointee, didn't answer any complaints. Apparently,
01:42he just locked himself in his office. Leandro Damore, the Brazilian famous investigative journalist,
01:47wrote about this just recently on his X, locked himself in the office, refused to make any kind
01:51of official statement. So, as it neared five in the afternoon, the Supreme Court overrode the superior
01:59electoral court. And through an order by Minister Cristiano Zanin, ordered the polling stations in
02:06every city in the country, in every location in the entire country, to stay open for another two hours.
02:12But in Sao Paulo, in the polling station I was at, with other Telestore personnel, they reopened the
02:19gate. And then five minutes later, they closed the gate. And election observers from the Workers'
02:24Party started arguing. The excuse that they gave was that they had already turned off all the electronic
02:30voting machines, and they couldn't be reinitiated. But the elections observers verified that there were
02:36plenty of electronic voting machines that had not been turned off. So after 50 minutes, they reopened the
02:43doors and let voters come back in. And from what I understand, this happened all over the country.
02:49And an election observer I spoke to at the Faculty of the Americas, where I was doing my reporting,
02:57she told me that basically, many of the directors of voting centers decided to ignore the Supreme Court
03:04order and follow instructions from the regional federal electoral court of Sao Paulo. And it created a
03:12lot of confusion. Finally, voting stopped at 7pm, two hours later than normal. And now the count has begun.
03:19But it's opened the door for all kinds of legal challenges from either side, depending on who wins
03:25the election tonight. We were expecting the results to come in at 9pm. Probably now they'll be in at around
03:3211pm because they've only started counting the votes two hours later than they had planned initially.
03:40But it's going to be interesting to see what happens. And everyone in Brazil right now is glued to their
03:45television sets watching the counts. Also, Brian, as you mentioned, now that now the vote counting is
03:53underway, that results are starting to come in, what should we paying attention to when it comes to
04:00results, when it comes to perhaps a possible mobilization that could take place there in
04:05Sao Paulo? What can we expect for the upcoming hours? Well, one thing to always pay attention to,
04:14or always take into consideration when you're watching these national Brazilian election results,
04:18is that the votes come in from the more conservative states first. Like, normally the first states that
04:24they tally the votes from are in southern Brazil and southeastern Brazil, which are strongholds of
04:30the Brazilian right. Whereas the north and northeast, which are strongholds of the Brazilian left,
04:35usually report the results later on. So in 2022, for example, Jair Bolsonaro was leading
04:42for the first hour and a half of the vote count. It wasn't until that point that Lula began to
04:47catch up
04:48with him and pass him up. So what we should expect is that at least for the next hour,
04:53Flavio Bolsonaro should be in the lead. And then the question is, will Lula's late surge be enough
05:00to take over the lead from him or not? In the first round, Lula began to catch up with him,
05:05but wasn't able to overtake him with the votes from the northeast. This is what we should pay attention to
05:10tonight. Thank you, Brian, very much. We will be in contact with you in upcoming emissions to know
05:17more, to get to know what is happening there in São Paulo in this crucial day for Brazilians.
