One Minute After Brazil's Polls Closed, Lula's Former Lawyer Ordered Two More Hours of Voting

Brazil's presidential polls closed at 5 p.m. Sunday, right on schedule. Then, at 5:01 p.m., a Supreme Court justice ordered the whole country to keep voting for two more hours.

The justice was Cristiano Zanin. Before President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put him on the Supreme Federal Court in 2023, Zanin was Lula's personal lawyer, the man who fought Lula's corruption cases. The request came from Lula's own campaign coalition. And Lula was on the ballot, in a tight runoff against conservative Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Counting resumed after 7 p.m. As this report published, the runoff was still being tallied. Whoever wins, every Brazilian now knows that the man who rewrote the closing time was the president's former lawyer, acting on the president's own request.

What Lula's side asked for, and what Zanin gave

Lula's coalition, which runs under the name Brasil Pronto Pra Mais, filed what Brazil calls a constitutional complaint. It named three cities in Bahia, a northeastern state that is Lula's strongest ground: Salvador, Feira de Santana and Lauro de Freitas. The claim was that those cities didn't run enough buses to get voters to the polls. Under a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, cities must run free public transit on election day at weekday levels.

Zanin's order runs a few short paragraphs, and his 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," he wrote, handing the election court the job of carrying it out. It was announced at 5:01 p.m., less than half an hour after the complaint landed and one minute after the polls had closed.

Read that again. A complaint about buses in three cities in one state became an order covering every polling station in a country of 158 million voters. The order cites no evidence of how many people were actually kept from voting, and it gives no reason for going national.

Flávio's campaign had asked for extra time too, but a much smaller ask: two more hours in a list of towns hit by heavy rain, flooding and power outages in Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina. That request went to the election court. Lula's campaign also went to the Supreme Court, where the case landed on the desk of Lula's former lawyer.

A count frozen at 0.25%

The election court's first partial count dropped at 5:06 p.m., with just 0.25% of voting machines in, mostly from the north and northeast. It showed Lula at 57.66% and Flávio at 42.34%. Then the count froze. Brazil's electoral court, known as the TSE, stopped taking in results until the new 7 p.m. deadline.

That left a country staring at a two-hour-old snapshot from Lula's best regions while voting went on. It's a bit like a referee stopping the clock after the final whistle because one team's bus ran late, and leaving the scoreboard frozen on the first few minutes of the game.

Cut down within the hour

Zanin's order said every polling station in Brazil. That ran straight into reality: most stations had already shut down, and Brazil's voting machines can't simply be switched back on once a station closes them. State election courts didn't know what to do.

So Zanin issued a second order narrowing his first. It applies "in the places where the ballot boxes were not closed," he wrote, and votes in machines already closed "will be counted and totaled." At 5:49 p.m., TSE President Kassio Nunes Marques, a 2020 Jair Bolsonaro appointee to the Supreme Court, sent every state election court its marching orders: stations "that are still open" stay open until 7 p.m., "in strict compliance with the court order." Nothing in it reopened a single closed polling place. The TSE posted the order on 𝕏, then said in a statement that the election "continues only in places where voting had not been closed at 5 p.m.," with nearly all its justices gathered in the president's office waiting for voting to end.

So a national two-hour extension shrank to whichever stations happened to still be open when the order landed. Those could take new voters until 7. Everywhere else, the polls stayed shut. And the whole country's count stayed frozen for two hours.

Bolsonaro's allies: 'a coup'

Flávio's camp didn't wait. 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. Later he called it a "shameful and untimely decision" by "an STF justice who was the current president's lawyer," made "at 5:01 p.m., after the close of the election." Elections for Lula's Workers' Party, he wrote, "are the ones they win. When they lose, it's a dictatorship."

Congressman and senator-elect Marcel van Hattem put it more bluntly: "Cristiano Zanin JUST pulled a coup on the elections by ordering TWO more hours of voting." He said Nunes Marques would have to rein him in "IMMEDIATELY." Within the hour, the order had been cut down. His post passed 238,000 views in about an hour.

Van Hattem then 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 was Lula's personal lawyer before becoming a justice. And who asked for the extension was Lula's own coalition!" Former Lava Jato prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, the man who once led the corruption case against Lula, told followers the extension was aimed at Bahia, "a traditionally PT state," meaning Lula's Workers' Party, and urged them: "Every vote counts!"

Why it matters

Brazil votes on electronic machines with no paper ballot for voters to check, and it counts everything in a few hours. That speed is the system's pride, and it depends on everyone trusting the referees. On Sunday, the judge who rewrote the closing time after the polls had closed was the incumbent's former lawyer, acting on the incumbent's own request.

Americans should recognize the move. Ask a friendly judge to keep the polls open after closing time in your strongest county, and call it voter access. In 2000, Al Gore's campaign and Missouri Democrats got a St. Louis judge to keep city polls open past closing time, until a state appeals court shut it down. Election-integrity advocates have fought those late extension orders ever since for exactly this reason. Brazil just ran the play on a national scale, in a presidential runoff.

What happens next depends on the count. Van Hattem says the impeachment request is coming. The Senate, not the courts, decides whether a Supreme Court justice can be impeached in Brazil, and the incoming Senate class includes van Hattem and Dallagnol themselves.