JAIR BOLSONARO has attempted to steal last month’s Brazilian presidential election on Tuesday by claiming that faulty voting machines were responsible for his defeat.

The right-wing incumbent blamed a software bug and demanded the electoral authority annul votes cast on most of the nation’s electronic balloting machines.

The move would leave Mr Bolsonaro with 51 per cent of the remaining valid votes, making him the winner, lawyer Marcelo de Bessa, who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party, told reporters.

The electoral authority has already declared victory for Mr Bolsonaro’s nemesis, left-wing former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and even many of the president’s allies have accepted the results.

But protesters in cities across Brazil have refused to accept the result and Mr Bolsonaro has pointedly declined to concede defeat.

Liberal Party leader Valdemar Costa and an auditor hired by the party told reporters in the capital Brasilia on Tuesday that their evaluation had found that all machines dating from before 2020 — nearly 280,000 of them, equating to about 59 per cent of the total used in the October 30 run-off — lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.

Neither explained how that might have affected election results, but they said that they were asking the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines.

Electoral authority head Alexandre de Moraes said that the court would not consider the complaint unless Mr Bolsonaro’s party offered an amended report within 24 hours including results from the first electoral round on October 2, in which the Liberal Party won more seats in both congressional houses than any other.

Diego Aranha, an associate professor of systems security at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has participated in official security tests of Brazil’s electoral system, said the points being raised by the allies of the defeated president would “not undermine the reliability or credibility [of the election] in any way.”

Senate Speaker Rodrigo Pacheco described the election results as “unquestionable.”

Mr Bolsonaro has been almost completely secluded in his official residence since his October 30 defeat, inviting widespread speculation as to whether he is plotting to cling to power.

Brazil’s electronic voting system, in use in since 1996, has been closely scrutinised by domestic and international experts, who have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud.