The polls said Flávio Bolsonaro was winning. He won the first round. Then, minutes before polls closed in Sunday’s runoff, a Supreme Court justice who used to be Lula’s personal lawyer ordered voting extended two hours, nationwide. When the count was done, Lula had won by 3.5 points.
Two days later, with his passports canceled and a travel ban on his head, Bolsonaro was in Florida, and the Trump administration was rolling out the welcome mat.
Marco Rubio was the one who rescued Flavio Bolsonaro, it turns out. Just incredible. America stands with our brothers in Brazil! 🇺🇸🤝🏻🇧🇷 https://t.co/h6LIxGMBQo
— The Conservative Alternative (@OldeWorldOrder) October 27, 2026
The numbers the right can’t square
The official count, per Brazil’s electoral court, gave Lula 51.77% to Bolsonaro’s 48.23%, the Rio Times reported. But the final polls had Bolsonaro at 50.7% to 51%, a swing of roughly three points against him from the last surveys to the count.
And this wasn’t a candidate the pollsters had been overrating. In the first round, polls had Lula ahead. Bolsonaro won it, 47.03% to 45.16%.
The two-hour extension
Polls were set to close at 5 p.m. Brasília time. At the request of Lula’s coalition, Justice Cristiano Zanin extended voting to 7 p.m. across the country. Lula’s side said mayors had cut bus service, stranding voters.
The order hit chaos. Some polling places had already shut down their machines and couldn’t restart them, and poll workers got contradictory instructions, the New York Times reported, as quoted by Townhall. Electoral lawyers warned the vote could be annulled. Fernando Neisser, an election law professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, said annulment is possible if the margin is narrow and stations in areas favoring one candidate stayed open longer.
The head of Brazil’s electoral court, Kassio Nunes Marques, reportedly said no rule authorized the extension and the court had never granted one before, Hot Air reported.
Conservative lawmakers erupted. Rep. Nikolas Ferreira said the extension helped “only one team.” Rep. Marcel van Hattem called it an “absurdity” and an attempt to win “in the courtroom.”
Bolsonaro demanded the election be annulled. He said his party’s poll watchers were pulled out of the secure vault room when the extension was decided. President Trump said the vote “looked like another rigged election.”
Then came the passports
Hours after Lula was declared the winner, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the same justice who oversaw the case that put Jair Bolsonaro away for 27 years, ordered Flávio to hand over all his passports within 24 hours, the Rio Times reported. The order stems from a sealed money-laundering inquiry. Bolsonaro hasn’t been charged and denies wrongdoing.
When the deadline passed, police canceled his passports. By then he had crossed into Argentina and caught a private flight to Ecuador, then on to Florida, Reuters and the Financial Times reported. A senior State Department official said the U.S. will issue visas to him and his family. Posts on X credited Secretary of State Marco Rubio with arranging the exit, which Washington hasn’t confirmed.
“Well, I would approve,” Trump said. “I think they’re fine people. The election was very strange, and I thought it was terrible.”
Bolsonaro’s party has recognized the result, and no evidence of tampering with the vote count has been made public. Lula called the departure “shameful” and said the family’s “first homeland is licking the boots of the US.”
The bottom line
A candidate leads the final polls and wins round one. Then his opponent’s former lawyer, sitting on the high court, changes the rules minutes before closing, even though the chief of the court that actually runs elections reportedly said no rule allowed it. The opponent wins. And within hours, the loser’s passports are being pulled.
No honest democracy runs elections that way. When the referee used to be on one team’s payroll, the other team has every right to ask questions, and Brazil owes them answers, not travel bans.
Brazil’s establishment wanted Flávio Bolsonaro grounded. Instead he’s in Florida, free to make his case, with the President of the United States calling the whole thing “terrible.”