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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Elections & voting fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about elections & voting. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

5,414 published reviews in this topic

Boatos.orgElections & voting

Boletim de urna encontrado na rua em Curitiba (Paraná) prova fraude de votos não contabilizados para Bolsonaro nas eleições

Publisher’s rating: Falso

The claim concerns a video circulated online after the first round of Brazil’s 2022 election. It alleged that a ballot-box bulletin found in the street in Curitiba proved votes for Jair Bolsonaro had not been counted. Boatos.org describes the video as showing people with a bulletin and says the accompanying messages claimed the document came from a polling section and had been discarded. The review cautions that the video itself does not establish where the bulletin was found: “até pode ser que o Boletim de Urna (BU) estivesse jogado na rua (o que não é possível de se comprovar, aliás)”. The review’s central explanation is that the printed bulletin is not the mechanism used to count votes. It reports that the Paraná Regional Electoral Court’s fact-checking service, Galha Confere, rejected the allegation, and quotes the court explaining that “a contagem dos votos não se dá a partir das vias impressas, mas sim a partir da leitura das mídias de resultado.” The review adds that the vote-counting results are stored on electronic media, including the “Memória de Resultado (MR), criada especificamente para a Justiça Eleitoral.” Thus, even if a printed copy were discarded, that fact alone would not show that votes had been omitted from the count. The allegation also misrepresented the bulletin’s distribution, according to the review. It says each ballot box prints five required copies, with up to five additional copies possible, and describes copies being posted at the polling place, sent to electoral authorities, or provided to party monitors, the press and the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The review therefore concludes that the video does not demonstrate uncounted Bolsonaro votes or election fraud; it does not claim to verify that the bulletin was actually found in the street.