Brazil's Supreme Court Kept Polls Open Two Extra Hours, Then Barred Flávio Bolsonaro From Leaving

A Supreme Court justice kept Brazil's presidential runoff open two hours past its legal closing time. Hours later, the candidate who said he could not accept the result was barred from leaving the country. Two days after that, Flávio Bolsonaro could not be found, and Washington said it would give him a visa.

"It is impossible to recognize the election results in the context in which these things happened," Flávio said on election night, in remarks carried by the Senate's radio service. "We are going to use our legal team to ask for these elections to be annulled." (Translated from Portuguese.)

Minutes after Brazil's election court declared President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva the winner on Sunday night, federal police asked Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to take the conservative senator's passports. Moraes signed off that same night. Flávio was given 24 hours to hand over every passport he held, including his diplomatic one.

He has not been charged with any crime. Police are investigating him in a money-laundering case tied to a lawyer friend and in a probe of how a film about his father was financed, according to Brazilian reports. He denies wrongdoing.

Two extra hours

Brazil's election code sets voting from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Only voters already in line at closing time may still cast a ballot. On Sunday afternoon, Lula's campaign asked the Supreme Court to extend voting across the whole country, citing cuts to bus service in several cities.

The case went to Justice Cristiano Zanin, who was Lula's personal lawyer until Lula appointed him to the court in 2023. Zanin extended voting until 7 p.m. in every municipality where polls had not yet closed, the Supreme Court announced. His order reached the court's system at 5:01 p.m., one minute after polls were due to close, Brazilian outlets reported, citing court records.

By then, thousands of voting machines had already been switched off and could not be restarted, so some polling places stayed open while others did not. Brazil's election court, which runs the vote, paused the release of results while people were still voting and resumed the count at 7 p.m. Its president, Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, said that night that no rule existed to guide an extension like Zanin's. "Everything was unusual," he said.

That uneven reach is the heart of Flávio's complaint: voters in different cities and states got different amounts of time, depending on whether their polling place had already shut down.

His allies went further. "Secret vote counting is, in itself, election fraud," his brother Eduardo, a former congressman, posted on X Monday night. President Trump told reporters the same day: "It looked like another rigged election, frankly. I didn't take sides, but it was a terrible look." Elections, he said, "have to be indisputable."

The election court says the extension changed nothing. Nunes Marques said the court carried out the order and that the outcome was unaffected. The official count gave Lula 51.78% of valid votes to Flávio's 48.22%, and fewer than 35,000 ballots were cast in the extra two hours, according to an analysis of election records reported by Reuters. Flávio's own campaign had asked the election court for more time in rain-hit cities of São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina. His objection is to one justice, outside the election court, ordering it nationwide at closing time. His Liberal Party said Monday it recognizes the result but wants the questions clarified, Reuters reported.

Where is Flávio?

The passport deadline passed Tuesday at 11 a.m. His own lawyers said they could not locate him to deliver the passports, and police canceled the documents and told Moraes the order had been defied, according to Brazilian reports. Police said they had found no formal record of him leaving the country.

Argentina's government said it had no record of him entering, after an Argentine outlet reported he had crossed the border to catch a private jet to Miami. A senior State Department official then told reporters from several news organizations that the United States will issue visas to Flávio and his family and let them into the country.

By Tuesday night, journalist Glenn Greenwald was reporting that the trip was done. "There are major questions about how Flavio Bolsonaro left Brazil this morning with his family for the US without detection by Brazil," Greenwald wrote on X, adding that Bolsonaro "has now arrived in the US." He said Brazilian authorities spent the morning "utterly confused and clueless," chasing a plane in Argentina that turned out to be "a decoy."

Flávio has not spoken publicly since Monday, when he said he would comply with the passport order and denied planning to leave Brazil, Reuters reported. His last post on X went up the night before the vote: "Our fight is for each one of you!" Neither he nor the U.S. government has publicly confirmed where he is, so unga.news is reporting his arrival as Greenwald's account, backed by the State Department's visa decision.

A ban before any charge

Greenwald, who has reported on Moraes for years, described the passport order as "the authoritarian and anti-democratic stench of having Brazil's globally notorious tyrannical judge order the passport seizure of Lula's opponent a mere 7 minutes after Lula was declared the winner."

He also pointed to a double standard. Lula's son, Greenwald noted, faces corruption investigations of his own, yet "His passport has never been seized or cancelled. In fact, he left Brazil to go live in extreme luxury in Spain."

Washington has made the case against Moraes before. In July 2025 the Treasury Department put him under Global Magnitsky sanctions, the U.S. penalty for human rights abusers, saying he had "revoked passports of his critics" and pursued "politicized prosecutions—including against former President Jair Bolsonaro." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Moraes "has taken it upon himself to be judge and jury in an unlawful witch hunt against U.S. and Brazilian citizens and companies."

Foreign courts keep saying no

Flávio is not the first Moraes target to seek safety abroad. Eduardo already lives in the United States and calls himself exiled. And foreign judges have repeatedly refused to send Moraes's targets back. Last week an Italian appeals court refused to extradite a former Moraes aide, ruling that Moraes was the victim, investigator and judge in the case, the second such refusal from Italy this year.

The other side

Lula's camp sees a fugitive. Gleisi Hoffmann, who led Lula's Workers' Party for years, called Flávio "the runaway, coward and militiaman" in a post on X Tuesday. Lula's government had not issued a formal statement on his departure by Tuesday night, Brazilian media reported.

The questions it now faces are hard ones. Why did one justice, outside the election court, change the closing time as polls were shutting? Why did police have a passport request ready within minutes of the count? Why was a man who has not been charged treated as a flight risk on election night? And if Brazil asks the United States to send him back, will American officials who sanctioned Moraes agree to hand over the man Moraes ordered grounded?