After years of asserting that Brazil’s electoral system was vulnerable to fraud, the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, ignored the country’s electoral court deadline on Monday to provide evidence of her accusations. The body, in turn, adopted one of its strongest measures yet to prevent Bolsonaro from eroding confidence in the country’s upcoming elections.

According to Bolsonaro’s ministers, his government has considered submitting a trove of videos and documents, most of which have already shown the far-right president in public on July 29, and that the court supervising and managing the elections has denied this.

The ministers, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the president, said ordering the government to search for evidence of vote fraud in the past 25 years did not produce such an example.

A minister and the Electoral Tribunal’s press office confirmed that no evidence was presented.

Bolsonaro emphasized that the Brazilian electronic voting system is unreliable and makes it impossible to audit results. Along these lines, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would produce a printed receipt for each vote, visible to the voter, before depositing it in a sealed container for later review, if necessary.

Analysts have expressed concern that Bolsonaro, who has lagged in opinion polls from his campaign for re-election in 2022, is following in the footsteps of former President Donald Trump, who has urged his supporters to reject his re-election defeat.

The Electoral Tribunal dismissed his claims as unfounded, claiming that the system was reliable and that there were several ways to verify the results. The chief justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, told the Associated Press at the time that the proposed reform would be a risky solution to a problem that does not exist, and that it would create opportunities for vote buying and accusations of fraud.

On Monday, the court unanimously approved a request by the Supreme Court to investigate Bolsonaro as part of the investigations into the dissemination of false news. It also agreed to open its own investigation into Bolsonaro into his allegations, which the court wrote in its ruling, may involve various crimes, including abuse of economic and political power, improper use of social media, corruption, fraud, or campaigning before the deadline. legal.

And the president promised last week that he would provide evidence of fraud, which he claims to have owned for a long time.