Banana Republic Status Confirmed

Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva won another election in Brazil. It does appear that he cheated. He may not have needed to cheat to win, but cheat he did. Can't have a banana republic if you don't cheat in elections.

How'd he do it? He complained that there were not enough buses deployed to ferry his constituents to the polls in the Northeast of Brazil (Bahia), Lula's stronghold due to its poverty relative to the rest of Brazil (Northeast Brazil at one time in the 16th century). When the Dutch controlled Recife, it was one of the greatest wealth-producing enclaves on earth thanks to the sugar trade, with Pernambuco at its center. But Brazil's sugar industry in the northeast collapsed when the Portuguese ousted the Dutch from the region. The Dutch proceeded to establish the sugar trade in the West Indies and destroyed the Brazilian sugar trade, and that region of Brazil became the most impoverished.)

Lula got one of the Supreme Federal Court judges to extend voting time by 2 hours. This was done after the official 5 PM poll closure. In the rest of Brazil, the polls closed at the set time. In Bahia, the polls did not close, pending the decision by the federal judge, and then continued to accept votes for the next two hours. The polling places that had indeed closed at the designated time were, for procedural reasons, kept closed. Voting throughout Brazil ceased at 5 PM except in Bahia, where polling stations continued open for another 2 hours.

So in Lula's greatest stronghold, but nowhere else in Brazil, voters were allowed to vote beyond the deadline. This had to have been a planned maneuver; otherwise the polls in Bahia would have been closed and unable to reopen, but those polls never did shut down at the appointed time, and were the only ones that did not shut down. It's reasonable to suppose that by the time the polls closed, Lula's party would have known how many votes were needed to win, making it hard to believe the procedure was not in place before the vote.

Furthermore, Lula sought this ploy of extended hours in the last national election, but was not allowed. He won anyway.

Before the last election, after Lula was convicted of corruption and jailed, a single judge overturned his conviction on a technicality with no further attempt to adjudicate his case. He was freed and allowed to run again for president. He then defeated Jair Bolsonaro—père to Flávio, Lula's 2026 opponent—to obtain his current office.

Lula has achieved something never before achieved in Brazilian history. Namely, he has won the general election after coming in second in the primary election. Surprise! Surprise!

So Brazil won't be joining the conservative wave in South America (Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru). It will become a more socialist country, headed by a man proven to be corrupt. One can say that Brazil has voted for corruption.

This seems familiar to me, as a resident of Georgia, where some strongly Democratic jurisdictions allow more days of early voting than other jurisdictions, and where mail-in ballots in Fulton County were opened and counted with no observers present before Election Day and where ballot tallies went missing in large numbers. (This is banned by state law but waved by the hapless Raffensperger, who just lost the primary in his Republican bid for the gubernatorial nomination.)

It may sound familiar to Californians, as the Golden State has no means of verifying citizenship—obviously a system set up intentionally to allow noncitizen voting—and, despite 20,000 noncitizens registered to vote in LA, the city and the state are not cooperating with DOJ efforts to ensure that noncitizens don't vote. This is a power that fully belongs, constitutionally, to the DOJ in federal elections, and it is an insult to ordinary human intelligence that Democrats rant against the DOJ for its efforts to ensure legitimate federal elections while demanding that we believe that federal elections in America are legitimate.

As Joe Biden would say, and he would know: "Malarkey!"