A judge in Brazil on Wednesday fined allies of the outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro who made a “bad faith” attempt to overturn last month’s election result. After Bolsonaro lost the race to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October, Bolsonaro challenged the result by arguing that votes cast on certain voting machines shouldn’t have counted. His coalition claimed to have found “signs of irreparable … malfunction” in some of the machines. But Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the head of the country’s electoral court, rejected the challenge on and fined the parties in Bolsonaro’s coalition $4.3 million. “The complete bad faith of the plaintiff’s bizarre and illicit request... was proven, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and the total absence of any evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narrative of the facts,” De Moraes wrote in his final decision.
