[matheusmoreira]

Brazilian here. The Biden administration and the CIA openly pressured our president to accept the election results before they happened. I gotta at least wonder if they knew he was going to lose.

Now there's nation-wide protests, calls for military intervention, election denialism with some rather convincing evidence, blatant censorship of anyone who's so much as asking if this is going to be investigated.

[DFHippie]

Biden, and presumably every other governmental official in every nation who truly believes in democracy, wasn't saying that Bolsonaro should step down regardless of whether he lost. They were saying he should step down if he lost. Basically, don't retain power by civil war. If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.

[matheusmoreira]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/cia-director-b...

CIA person "urging" a president of a soverign country to stop doubting voting machines? Calling his doubts "baseless"? I mean, the USA has paper ballots to this day because of the exact same "baseless" doubts. It's essentially world wide consensus that voting machines are a bad idea, some countries straight up declared them unconstitutional. But these USA officials pressured our president not to question the system of his own country. A CIA guy at that, from a country known for compromising the world's security and spying on everyone.

I'm sorry but there's so much wrong with that it's not even funny. If that's not interference I don't know what is. The more I research these elections the uglier it gets.

> If the election you won legitimized your government, the election you lost legitimizes Lula's government.

Right now it doesn't seem like this election legitimitized either government. The unprecedented censorship is not inspiring confidence. I wonder what will happen now...

[divided]

If Brazil is anything like the US, there are many, many safeguards in place whenever an election machine is certified and used.

Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims.

In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.

[matheusmoreira]

> So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election

This isn't what he was doing though. He wanted the voting machines to have a printer function so that an auditable paper trail was established. I've seen highly voted comments arguing for this exact same thing here on HN not even a week ago.

> and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims

I did doubt those claims. At first.

Some serious evidence has surfaced though: discrepancies in the election data set showing older less thoroughly audited voting machines clearly favoring the winning candidate by as much as 15%.

I was still skeptical, tried to reproduce the results on my own dataset... Then I watched the government's election website go down for hours, then come back up with the data set modified. Then I watched a supreme court judge censor anyone asking questions about this on Twitter.

It's not exactly inspiring confidence.

> In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.

The 2020 voting machine models seem to have been thoroughly audited. However, we're still using older models and I don't think they were audited recently. There were discrepancies in the voting patterns of the 2020 model and older models and nobody has been able to refute that at this time.