General Paulo Srgio Nogueira, first from the left, in the photo with Bolsonaro (Photo: Marcos Corra/PR)
The Minister of Defense, General Paulo Srgio Nogueira, the one who asked for the most urgent urgency in accessing the source code of electronic voting machines open and available for consultation since October 2021 and drove “an expensive car” in front of the whole country, received one another institutional slap in the face by Minister Edson Fachin, the current President of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), who denied access to the archives of the 2014 and 2018 elections. They are one of the oversight bodies for current elections and are not auditors of past elections. Furthermore, there is no statutory provision for “external control” of the Court. Finally, the statutory deadlines for consultations of this type ended on January 13, 2015 and January 17, 2019 respectively.
The request for the files was signed by Army Colonel Marcelo Nogueira de Souza, head of the Armed Forces team that will take part in monitoring the elections, but the letter was sent by the Defense Ministry, which received a negative reply from Fachin. To add to the embarrassment, part of the arguments have been answered by providing ‘web links’ from the court’s open data portal itself, ie they are already public and notable.
Another reason for the embarrassment was the exclusion of Army Colonel Ricardo Sant’ana from the aforementioned group of military personnel who will oversee the election process next October because he is a habitual disseminator and/or sharer of “fake news” (known as false news) is ). The decision was made by the TSE, which recalled that this court itself had jurisdiction to invite the armed forces to form the inspection group.
Sadly, after 25 years of silence about the electronic voting machines and the election process itself, some military personnel have turned up in resonance with the coup attacks by President Jair Bolsonaro, the Planalto’s henchman, without the slightest evidence of fraud or formal errors in the electronic system that powers the votes collects, stores and counts, launched an improper and unconstitutional offensive against a higher court.
For those who didn’t pay due attention to the last two words, I repeat them: Supreme Court. Who are the armed forces, or half a dozen of their officers, constitutionally of course, who claim to be inspectors, examiners, controllers or other terms of a higher court, in this case the electoral court? Who or what gave them such a privilege or function? The federal constitution was not.
That is why they will cry into the lap of myth, friend of Queiroz, because, as the jargon says, “is not a bird”. At least as long as there is an independent organized civil society and a free press alongside the rule of law advocated by the charter, the content of which the Bundeswehr is committed to and swears to defend, which is why it has the empowerment of the people through their representatives to use force and arms.