Lula's Former Lawyer Extended Brazil's Vote After Polls Closed. Hours Later, the TSE Declared Lula Winner

Brazil's presidential polls closed at 5 p.m. Sunday, right on schedule. At 5:01 p.m. in Brasília, one minute later, Supreme Federal Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered two more hours of voting "in all polling stations in all of Brazil."

Zanin was President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's personal lawyer before Lula put him on the court in 2023. The request he granted came from Lula's own campaign coalition. And Lula was on the ballot, in a runoff against conservative Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Minutes after the order, Brazil's election court, the TSE, stopped counting votes and kept the count frozen until 7 p.m.

No Brazilian court had done anything like it in the electronic-voting era. Folha de S.Paulo found no similar decision since the country moved to electronic voting machines in 1994, and neither the campaigns nor the election coordinators it spoke to knew of one. In the 2022 runoff, when Lula's Workers' Party asked the TSE to extend voting because highway police stops were slowing voters in the Northeast, then-TSE President Alexandre de Moraes said no.

When counting resumed, the TSE's tally showed Lula ahead. With 99.81% of polling stations counted, it had Lula at 51.76% and Flávio at 48.24%, a margin of about 4.4 million votes, and the court marked the race mathematically decided shortly after 9 p.m.

Update: Flávio won't concede

Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede Sunday night and said he will seek to annul the runoff over Zanin's extension. "It's impossible to recognize the election result in the context of how these things happened," he said in a statement carried live by Jovem Pan News. "We're going to ask for these elections to be annulled."

His reason is the extension. "A Supreme Court justice, for the first time in history, Lula's former lawyer, signs an order at the request of his former partner and changes the rules in the middle of the game," he said. Read Flávio's full statement and his case for annulment.

How the polls stayed open after closing time

The fight started in Bahia, the northeastern state that is Lula's strongest ground. At 1:22 p.m., Lula's campaign asked the TSE to extend voting in three Bahia cities, Salvador, Feira de Santana and Lauro de Freitas, saying they had cut bus service to the polls, according to a case timeline compiled by Valor Econômico. Under a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, cities must run free public transit on election day at weekday levels. Early that afternoon, Bahia's regional election court had ordered Salvador's mobility secretary arrested over the bus cuts.

At 3:27 p.m., Flávio's campaign asked the TSE for more time in 17 towns in São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina hit by heavy rain. Both requests sat with the TSE.

Lula's campaign didn't wait. At 3:46 p.m. it went over the election court's head to the Supreme Court, asking for an extension in ten states. At 4:29 p.m. it widened that request to all of Brazil. The case was assigned to Zanin. His order says the facts "came to the knowledge of the Supreme Federal Court at 16:32:49." The polls closed at 5. One minute later came the order, and its entire reasoning is one sentence:

"Considering the gravity of the facts reported, which came to the knowledge of the Supreme Federal Court at 16:32:49 today, and given the evident urgency of the measure, I order an extension by two hours, until 7 p.m., Brasília time, of the close of voting in all polling stations in all of Brazil, with the TSE responsible for carrying it out."

The order cites no count of voters actually kept from the polls. Zanin did not step aside from a case brought by his former client's coalition, in an election his former client was contesting.

A count frozen at 0.25%

The TSE's first partial results had dropped at 5:06 p.m., with 0.25% of voting machines in, mostly from the North and Northeast. They showed Lula at 57.66%. Then, at 5:20 p.m., the TSE said it had stopped totaling votes. For two hours, the only national number on the board was a snapshot from Lula's best regions.

Zanin's order said every polling station in Brazil, but most had already closed, and Brazil's voting machines can't simply be switched back on once a station seals them. At 5:49 p.m., TSE President Kassio Nunes Marques told state election courts that only stations "that are still open" should keep voting until 7, "in strict compliance with the court order."

Around 6 p.m., Zanin issued a second order narrowing the first to "the places where the ballot boxes were not closed." In it, he wrote that "the two candidacies disputing the presidential election in the second round alleged problems in transporting voters, which is why I granted the injunction." Flávio's request had gone to the TSE, not to Zanin, and covered 17 rain-hit towns. The second order also opens with a line worth reading twice: it was issued "without prejudice to the necessary investigations in due course and their legal consequences."

The TSE then said in a statement that the election "continues only in places where voting had not been closed at 5 p.m.," and that nearly all its justices were gathered in the president's office waiting for voting to end. We covered the order as it happened in our earlier report.

What the count shows

In the first round on Oct. 4, Flávio finished first with 56,104,503 votes to Lula's 53,879,538. In the runoff count, with 99.81% of stations in, Flávio had 59,745,429 and Lula about 64.1 million. The final Datafolha poll, released Saturday, had Flávio ahead 51% to 49% in valid votes.

Bahia gave Lula 71.31% of its vote and a net margin of about 3.8 million. In the three Bahia cities named in the bus complaint, turnout rose more than in the rest of the country: Salvador from 79.9% in the first round to 84.2%, Feira de Santana from 82.8% to 87.0%, and Lauro de Freitas from 77.1% to 82.7%. Nationwide, turnout went from 78.9% to 80.8%. Lula's net margin in the three cities was about 865,000 votes, up 209,000 from the first round.

The TSE's files do not say how many votes were cast in the extra two hours, or where.

Flávio's side: 'shameful'

Flávio's camp called the order what they saw it as before the count was done. Senator Rogério Marinho, who runs Flávio's campaign, posted that it was "impressive, the level of intervention by some STF justices," and said he hoped "any judicial coup or administrative trickery" would not succeed. After the order came down, he called it a "shameful and untimely decision by an STF justice who was the current president's lawyer, who decides at 5:01 p.m., after the close of the election." It was, he wrote, an "unenforceable action to disrupt the process of an election they had already lost at the ballot box. An election for the PT is the one they win; when they lose, it's a dictatorship."

Congressman and senator-elect Marcel van Hattem wrote that Zanin "JUST pulled a coup on the elections" and said he will file for Zanin's impeachment, arguing the justice "decided without having the authority to do so and after 5 p.m., when the electoral process was already legally closed," with "a clear sign of bias" because Zanin had been Lula's personal lawyer. Van Hattem, who observed Venezuela's 2015 legislative election, said the same thing happened there: "the Bolivarian electoral court extended voting by one hour."

Former Lava Jato prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol called Zanin's ruling "an unenforceable decision that only serves to disrupt the elections" and asked: "Is Zanin giving Lula a path to annul the elections?" Congressman Nikolas Ferreira wrote: "Another impeachment for next year." Rio senator-elect Carlos Jordy of Flávio's Liberal Party (PL), arriving where Flávio was following the count, told O Globo the order "only makes the population feel more disgust, more repulsion at the way he has been governing our country."

Flávio's allies were also angry that the order covered the whole country, not just the cities named in the complaints, R7 reported. As of Sunday evening, O Globo reported, the campaign had not decided whether to challenge the election in court.

Flávio himself had not spoken on the result when this report was first published. On Sunday morning, after voting in Rio, he called his race "a cheerful, clean campaign" and said "the time has come for real change."

What comes next

Lula, after voting, told reporters that "winning or losing, we accept the result and get ready for the next fight." Under the TSE's count he would be sworn in for a fourth term on Jan. 5, 2027.

Van Hattem says the impeachment request against Zanin is coming. In Brazil, the Senate decides whether a Supreme Court justice can be impeached, and the incoming Senate includes van Hattem and Dallagnol. Zanin's own second order left the door open to "investigations in due course and their legal consequences." Whatever the Senate does, every Brazilian now knows how this runoff ended: with the polls held open past closing time by the president's former lawyer, at the request of the president's own coalition.