Counted but Not Yet Valid

Brazil’s electoral court finished its count of the first round overnight, and the presidency goes to a second round. Its national results file, with every polling station counted, gives Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party 56,104,503 votes, or 47.03 per cent of the valid vote, and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 53,879,538, or 45.16 per cent. Neither cleared the absolute majority that article 77 of the Constitution requires, “não computados os em branco e os nulos”, leaving out blank and null ballots. The two meet again on Sunday 25 October, the last Sunday of the month, as the same article provides.

That result is settled arithmetic. Three others are not. In Rio de Janeiro, whether there is a runoff for governor at all now depends on a ruling the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral has not yet made. In Paraná and Amapá, candidates the court lists as elected are waiting on the same court to decide whether they could stand. In each case the votes have been counted. What the court has not decided is whether they are valid.

The national count

The court’s file records 158,745,502 registered voters, of whom 125,275,835 voted, a turnout of 78.92 per cent. Blank ballots were 2,300,798 and null ballots 3,674,249, leaving 119,300,788 valid votes. Those valid votes are the denominator article 77 uses, and the reason the percentages above are higher than each candidate’s share of all ballots cast. Augusto Cury of Avante was third with 2.89 per cent, Renan Santos of Missão fourth with 2.24 and Ronaldo Caiado of the PSD fifth with 2.18. The margin between the two leaders is 2,224,965 votes.

The file also carries a small figure that shows the rules working as written. It lists 5,246 “technical null” votes. On the eve of the vote, as this publication reported, the court’s candidate file classed votes for the PRTB ticket, whose candidate Leonardo Avalanche withdrew after the deadline for a replacement, as a “nulo técnico”: his number stayed on the machine, and votes cast for it were counted as null. The file does not say which ticket the 5,246 belong to. It counts them among the null votes.

Lula called the result “inesperado”, unexpected, and Bolsonaro said he was “muito feliz”, very happy, g1 reported. In 2022 Lula led the first round over Jair Bolsonaro, 57,259,504 votes to 51,072,345. The elder Bolsonaro, declared ineligible by the electoral court in 2023 for eight years from that election, was not on the ballot.

Rio: a runoff that depends on the denominator

In Rio the court’s state file gives Douglas Ruas of the Liberal Party 4,271,199 votes for governor, or 49.27 per cent, and Eduardo Paes of the PSD 3,706,984, or 42.76 per cent. The file marks both “2º turno”: second round. Third, with 274,411 votes, is the former governor Anthony Garotinho of Republicanos, and beside his name the file does not say “Válido”, as it does for the others. It says “Anulado sub judice”.

Garotinho’s registration was rejected by the regional electoral court, which held that his political rights are suspended for eight years over a conviction for administrative misconduct, Consultor Jurídico reported. His appeal to the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral is pending. Article 16-A of the elections law lets a candidate in that position keep campaigning and keep his name on the machine, “ficando a validade dos votos a ele atribuídos condicionada ao deferimento de seu registro por instância superior”: the validity of his votes is conditional on a higher court granting his registration.

Until that happens, his votes sit in the denominator. On Sunday the court’s president, Kassio Nunes Marques, declined to hear a request from Garotinho’s coalition and wrote that a colleague’s order of Friday, which had classified the votes as annulled sub judice, did not change the count. He cited article 18, paragraph 2, of the court’s totalisation resolution, 23.677 of 2021, which says that votes for a candidate whose registration has been rejected “serão considerados no cálculo dos percentuais obtidos por cada concorrente ao pleito majoritário”, will be counted in calculating each contender’s percentage, according to the text of the decision published by Metrópoles. The validity of the votes, he wrote, still depends on the court’s judgment on the registration.

The court’s file shows the arithmetic. It puts the base for Rio’s percentages at 8,669,038 votes, the valid votes plus Garotinho’s. Half of that is 4,334,519, and Ruas is 63,320 short of it. Take Garotinho’s 274,411 out, as a final rejection of his registration would, and the base falls to 8,394,627. Ruas’s share becomes 50.88 per cent and Paes’s 44.16, the same recalculation Metrópoles published on Monday. That would be a first-round majority, and no runoff. If the court instead grants Garotinho’s registration, his votes become valid, Ruas stays below half, and the runoff on 25 October goes ahead. The president of Rio’s regional court, Claudio Mello, declined on Sunday to say whether Ruas would be declared governor. “A palavra final está com o TSE,” he said, the final word lies with the national court, g1 reported.

That leaves the timing of a runoff campaign in the hands of a court. Ruas said after the count that he trusted the institutions and hoped for a quick decision, Metrópoles reported. Veja reported that his allies were working on the possibility that Garotinho might drop his appeal, which would leave the rejection standing. Garotinho said on Saturday that he expected his appeal to be heard on Monday or Tuesday and that he would not give up: “nem vou desistir”, O Globo reported. On Monday morning his lawyers asked for priority on the ground of his age, O Globo reported, and the regional court sent the appeal to Brasília marked urgent, according to Metrópoles. No date for the hearing had been set. O Globo listed the court’s plenary sessions between the rounds on Monday morning: Tuesday 6 October, then the 8th, 13th, 15th, 20th, 22nd and 27th. The last of those falls after the runoff.

Elected, pending appeal

In Paraná, Deltan Dallagnol of Novo, the former Lava Jato prosecutor, took the state’s second Senate seat with 2,904,594 votes, or 25.14 per cent, behind Filipe Barros of the Liberal Party. The court’s file lists both as “Eleito”. Dallagnol’s registration is not final. In 2023 the court cancelled the registration on which he had been elected a federal deputy, and he lost the seat, after finding that he had resigned from the federal prosecution service while facing internal proceedings that could have led to his dismissal, and so to ineligibility. The regional court in Paraná approved his Senate registration by four votes to three on 8 September, and the national court’s plenary, by five to two on 21 September, kept in force an order barring him from campaigning while the appeal was heard, g1 reported.

The last two days before the vote reversed his position twice. On Saturday Minister Floriano de Azevedo Marques rejected the registration in an individual decision and ordered the ticket’s votes treated as null. On Sunday morning Nunes Marques suspended that decision, holding, as O Globo summarised it, that an individual decision could not have definitive effects on the candidacy and the votes before the full court had spoken. The registration returned to “deferido com recurso”, granted subject to appeal, and the votes were counted as valid. The plenary has still to decide the appeal. If it finds him ineligible, g1 reported, the whole ticket is barred, his substitutes do not take the seat, and Paraná may have to hold a new Senate election. Paragraph 3 of article 224 of the Electoral Code provides for new elections, once the decision is final, when a court rejects the registration of a candidate elected in a majoritarian race, “independentemente do número de votos anulados”, however many votes are annulled.

In Amapá the court’s file shows Dr Furlan of the PSD elected governor with 62.75 per cent. His registration appeal was half-heard when the vote took place. The plenary began on 24 September; the rapporteur, Minister Dias Toffoli, voted to reject the registration, on the ground that Furlan resigned as mayor of Macapá partly to escape a proceeding that could have removed him, and Minister André Mendonça then asked for more time to study the case, O Globo reported.

A rule written for this

None of this is a malfunction. Article 16-A was added in 2009 for exactly the situation in which an election calendar does not wait for registration cases to finish: the candidate runs, the votes are counted, and their validity follows the final judgment. What the 2026 cases have added, the lawyers João Marcos Ferreira de Souza and Cristiano Vilela in an essay for Consultor Jurídico published on Monday, is provisional orders that impose, before the registration is judged, restrictions with much the same effect as a rejection. The article’s force, they write, depends on the electoral courts resisting the temptation to turn “probabilidade em decisão”, probability into decision. On Rio, the essay notes that the national court never declared Garotinho eligible: in August, it said, Floriano had only restored his campaign rights pending the regional court’s judgment.

For the presidency, the rules leave no such gap. All twelve tickets in the presidential count are recorded as valid, so the runoff is set. For the governor of Brazil’s third most populous state, the date of the next vote is set too, and whether it is held is for the plenary to decide.

Sources

All national, Rio, Paraná and Amapá figures are from the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral’s official results files for the 2026 first round (presidential file as published on 5 October; state files as published on 4 and 5 October), with 100 per cent of sections counted; percentages without Garotinho’s votes were computed from those files and match Metrópoles’s. Running totals in early wire and Agência Brasil reports differ slightly because they were taken before the count closed. Article 77 of the Constitution, article 16-A of Law 9.504 and article 224 of the Electoral Code were read on the Planalto’s legislation site. Nunes Marques’s Sunday decision on Garotinho is quoted as published by Metrópoles; Resolution 23.677 was not read directly (tse.jus.br refused the request). His Deltan decision is as summarised by O Globo, and the Deltan chronology is from g1. Mello’s remarks are from g1, the Ruas camp’s position from Metrópoles and Veja, the plenary calendar and Furlan case from O Globo, and the leaders’ reactions and 2022 figures from g1. Garotinho’s conviction is as Consultor Jurídico reported it. Garotinho’s Saturday remarks are from O Globo (3 October); his lawyers’ Monday request and the absence of a hearing date from O Globo, and the regional court’s transmission of the appeal from Metrópoles (both 5 October). The court’s individual decisions in the Deltan and Furlan cases were not read.