Flávio Bolsonaro has announced that he will go to the courts to request the annulment of the second round of the Brazilian presidential elections. His argument focuses on the extension of the voting and its unequal application between polling stations that remained open and others that had already closed. But that political announcement still needs to be translated into a concrete legal request.
This would be the legal roadmap to carry out his announcement.
1. Identify what act he challenges and what he wants to be annulled
The first step for Bolsonaro's lawyers would be to define the object of the claim: the resolution of the Supreme Federal Court that extended the hours, its execution by the electoral authorities, the voting at certain tables, or the national result.
The distinction determines where to file the document. A resolution of the Supreme must be contested through the procedural mechanisms of the Supreme itself. Local voting and counting incidents follow the channels of Electoral Justice; not all can be raised directly and for the first time before the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). Its jurisprudence distinguishes between local and regional competencies and the intervention of the TSE in appeals.
Therefore, it would not be enough to register a generic request for “the elections to be repeated”: it would have to identify the questioned acts, the legal basis, and the requested consequence.
2. Preserve the claims and check the deadlines immediately
His defense would have to collect the protests presented by the party representatives during the day and the counting, with their registration justifications.
This matters because the Electoral Code requires, as a rule, to have timely contested the nullities that are later intended to be appealed. Article 171 conditions the appeals against the counting to the existence of a prior challenge before the corresponding board; Article 223 contemplates specific rules for unforeseen or constitutional reasons.
There is no single deadline to “challenge the elections”. Article 258 establishes a general deadline of three days from the publication of the act when the electoral legislation does not set another special one. That deadline should not be automatically transferred to an appeal before the Supreme or to other actions with their own regulation.
3. Build a file of evidence regarding the extension
To support the claim, your team would have to request and provide documentation that allows reconstructing what happened. Among the relevant elements would be:
- The judicial resolutions and the times they were communicated to the electoral authorities.
- The identification of the polling stations that closed at the scheduled time and those that remained open.
- The incident reports and the available technical records.
- The participation data and the reports on the obstacles to voting.
- The complaints from the party's prosecutors and the testimonies that can be corroborated.
This list describes the documentation that would allow examining your argument; it does not mean that this evidence already exists or proves an irregularity.
The central legal obstacle would be to demonstrate a relevant harm: Brazilian electoral doctrine applies the principle that it is not appropriate to declare a nullity without proven harm.
4. Submit the document through the appropriate channel
With that material, the lawyers would have to formalize the challenge or the appeal, certify the representation of the candidate or the legitimized party, and specify their requests.
If the goal is to challenge the resolution of Judge Cristiano Zani, they would have to determine the admissible appeal within the Supreme Court's procedure and request, when appropriate, its collegial review. Without examining the file and the notification of that resolution, the exact appeal and its deadline cannot be rigorously established.
If nullities of polling stations or the counting are reported, the competencies and resources of the Electoral Justice must be respected. The fact that it is a presidential election does not automatically allow bypassing those instances.
5. Explicitly request a precautionary measure if intending to halt any procedure
Requesting nullity and achieving the provisional suspension of the effects of the result are different matters.
If Bolsonaro intends to stop a specific procedure, his defense would have to request a precautionary measure, identify which action he wants to suspend, and justify the urgency and legal basis for that suspension. The submission of the claim does not by itself equate to obtaining that measure.
6. Choose other actions only if the facts fit their requirements
There are two relevant instruments to question the legitimacy of a presidential candidacy, but neither functions as a universal challenge to any incident:
The Electoral Judicial Investigation Action (AIJE) allows for the reporting of, among other behaviors, abuse of economic, political, or authority power and misuse of the media. It can be presented up to the date of the diplomação, the official accreditation of the elected candidates.
The Electoral Mandate Challenge Action (AIME) can be filed within 15 days following that accreditation and requires grounds of abuse of economic power, corruption, or fraud.
In the presidential elections, it is the responsibility of the TSE to originally know of these actions. The discrepancy with a judicial resolution regarding schedules does not, by itself, substantiate any of those assumptions.
Furthermore, if abuse of power were alleged through an AIJE, the criterion would not be exclusively to demonstrate that the winner changed: the TSE also examines the severity of the behaviors and their impact on the legitimacy of the dispute.
7. Justify why the solution should affect the entire second round
The last argumentative step would be to explain why the reported facts would require the annulment of the national election and not a response limited to certain incidents.
Proving a problem at some polling stations does not automatically demonstrate that the entire second round should be repeated. Its defense would have to relate the accredited irregularity to the scope of the requested nullity and substantiate the corresponding legal consequence.
Article 224 of the Electoral Code contemplates the renewal of the presidential election when the nullity affects more than half of the votes in the country. But it is a rule regarding the consequences of a judicially declared nullity: it does not allow obtaining it simply by invoking that article.
The decisive question will therefore be what document Bolsonaro registers, what evidence he presents, and what he exactly requests from the court. Until those elements are known, a unique procedure, a common deadline, or a guaranteed electoral repetition cannot be attributed to his announcement.