More than three weeks after losing his re-election bid, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has blamed a software bug and demanded that swathes of votes be voided.

He is seeking to have votes from nearly 280,000 machines annulled – but independent experts say the bug doesn’t affect the reliability of results.

Such a move would leave Mr Bolsonaro with 51% of the remaining valid votes – and a re-election victory, according to Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party.

The electoral authority has already declared victory for his opponent, leftist former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, following Brazil’s most polarised election in recent memory.

Many of the president’s allies have accepted the results but millions of his supporters have not, taking to the streets of São Paulo and 70 other cities across Brazil.

Mr Bolsonaro spent more than a year claiming Brazil’s electronic voting system is prone to fraud, without ever presenting evidence.

Liberal Party leader Valdemar Costa and an auditor hired by the party claim that their evaluation found all machines dating from before 2020 – about 59% of the total used in the 30 October runoff vote – lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.

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Neither have explained how that might have affected election results, but nonetheless they have asked the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines.

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While the party’s lawyer has suggested that annulling all votes cast from the machines would leave Mr Bolsonaro with a majority of the vote, the head of the electoral authority issued a ruling that implicitly raised the possibility that his own party could suffer from such a challenge.

Wilson Ruggiero, a professor of computer engineering at the Polytechnic School of the University of Sao Paulo, said of the bug: “It does not undermine the reliability or credibility in any way.

“The key point that guarantees correctness is the digital signature associated with each voting machine.”

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