Things are happening in Brazil these days, and some of them might sound familiar:

Brazil’s defense ministry has issued a report that highlights flaws in the country’s electoral systems and proposes improvements but contains nothing to substantiate claims of fraud from some of President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters who have protested his defeat.

The document, released [November 9], was the first comment by the military on the Oct. 30 runoff election, which has drawn protests nationwide from Bolsonaro supporters even as the transition has begun for President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s inauguration Jan. 1. Thousands have been gathering outside military installations in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia and other cities calling for intervention by the armed forces to keep Bolsonaro in office.

When the defense ministry announced…that it would present its report on the election, some Bolsonaro supporters rejoiced, anticipating the imminent revelation of a smoking gun. That didn’t happen.

“There is nothing astonishing in the document,” said Diego Aranha, an associate professor of systems security at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has participated in the Brazilian electoral authority’s public security tests. “The limitations found are the same ones analysts have been complaining about for decades … but that doesn’t point to evidence of irregularity.”

Of course not – because it could not.

I will say of Brazil what I’ve been saying over and over of the US: unless there is perceived election security, people who supported the loser will infer election fraud. That’s true whether fraud actually occurs or not, and perhaps even more importantly: there will never be definitive evidence that enough fraud occurred to swing the election. There’s a simple reason for that, very simple. It’s that once the rules are changed so that lack of security becomes a significant issue, that same process also erases any ability to track it properly. Recounts will not matter because the thought is not that the count was wrong the first time, but that the votes themselves – ballots, computer data, whatever – were invalid and untethered to the people’s actual will or actual votes.

This is a problem, a big big problem, for those who don’t control the voting rules or the voting mechanisms. In the US it’s done on a state-by-state basis, and the rules vary widely. In Florida there’s little doubt about the validity of the results. In many swing states there is tremendous doubt. In Brazil, I’m going to assume the rules are uniform.

More from the article:

Defense Minister Paulo Nogueira wrote that “it is not possible to say” with certainty that the computerized vote-tabulation system hasn’t been infiltrated by malicious code, but the 65-page report does not cite any abnormalities in the vote count. Based on the possible risk, however, the report suggests creating a commission composed of members of civil society and auditing entities to further investigate the functioning of the electronic voting machines…

Brazil began using an electronic voting system in 1996. Election security experts consider such systems less secure than hand-marked paper ballots, because they leave no auditable paper trail. Brazil’s system is, however, closely scrutinized and domestic authorities and international observers have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud. Outside security audits have been conducted to prevent the system’s software from being surreptitiously altered. In addition, before election day, tests are conducted to assure that no tampering has occurred.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: computerized voting machines without a paper trail are an abomination. I don’t care if they’re squeaky clean and make the election officials’ life easier. People don’t trust them and they therefore lead to trouble. Same for mail-in voting. They need to be abolished (or the latter confined to a very tiny number of people), but I doubt that will ever happen. The ratchet only goes in one direction, and it favors the group that appeals to more urban voters.

I know little to nothing about Brazil’s political history. But I see that not only did the machines first come into play in 1996, but an amendment was passed in 1997 that allowed presidents to be re-elected to a second consecutive term, which was a new policy for Brazil. In 1998 the then-president of Brazil was re-elected for a second consecutive term, and in the next election Lula (the declared victor in this most recent election as well) was elected to his first term and then four years later was re-elected. He was followed by Dilma Rousseff, who had been part of his government and later was impeached and removed from office, to be replaced by a VP. Then Bolsonaro in 2018, who represented the first respite from Lula-dominant government since 2002. And now Lula again in 2022 (apparently a third term is allowable when it’s not a consecutive term).

If you want to see a banana republic type of history (even long before 1996), take a look at that Wiki page and try to wade through it (also see this). No wonder the people of Brazil are suspicious.

There is also this alarming post by Thomas Lifson at American Thinker. He writes:

As reported by Susan D. Harris today, the new government in Brazil, following an election that has been widely disputed as fixed by millions of demonstrators, has learned from the totalitarian response of the Trudeau government in Canada, seizing the bank accounts of protesters in that nation’s Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, and is trying to take away demonstrators’ children from the custody of their parents.

If you follow the link to the Harris article, you’ll get more of the chilling details.