The report on the coup plot in the government shows that the person responsible for the audit was alerted by one of his collaborators regarding the lack of evidence of fraud in the data that, days later, were used by the party at the (Superior Electoral Court).
These alerts came from Eder Balbino, who collaborated with the Instituto Voto Legal, engineer Carlos Rocha, hired by PL to conduct the audit.
The PF did not indicate in the report whether Valdemar was also directly informed of the inconsistency of the arguments used. Valdemar and Rocha were indicted by the PF. Balbino, no.
On November 22, 2022, the PL filed a lawsuit with the TSE requesting the invalidation of votes cast in ballot boxes of models prior to 2020, based on the absence of the ballot box’s serial code in the “logbook”, the so-called logs. , of these older equipment.
“The absence of correct identification in each Log file makes it impossible to associate the Log file with the respective urn that generated it and, consequently, with the BU [boletim de urna]”, said the report signed by Rocha.
The party claimed that, without this data, it was not possible to monitor them — it questioned, however, only the second round, despite this having occurred in both rounds.
The PF highlights as evidence a file in which Balbino makes considerations to Rocha, in which he points out that it was possible to correlate the ballot box logs, with the ballot papers and also with the ballot boxes themselves, differently from what was alleged in the action presented in the TSE days later.
“Is it possible [correlacionar o log com o boletim de urna] due to the name of the log file generated by Urna. The name of the file has a pattern that includes: the municipality code, the zone number and the section number”, said an excerpt from the file sent to Rocha by Balbino days before the PL contested the old ballot boxes.
According to the PF, the contents seized from Balbino “demonstrated the intentional actions” of Valdemar, Bolsonaro and Carlos Rocha, “evidence that those investigated were fully aware that the ‘technical arguments’, which served as the basis for the action, were false, not proving any fraud or irregularity in the electronic voting system”.
The PF highlights that the rectification was not only not carried out but there were “statements, in a PL press conference, spreading what was already known to be false”. He also says that this attitude demonstrated “his adherence to the coup plan”.
Still on the 22nd, the allegations made in the PL action.
Valdemar said that the problem had been discovered by a “genius from Uberlândia” — the municipality where Gaio.io, a company in which Balbino is a partner, has one of its addresses. “He discovered this problem that our people hadn’t discovered. So we were forced to put it there”, said the PL president at the time.
According to the PF, before filing the lawsuit, Valdemar exchanged messages with Balbino, making requests directly to him.
“The object of the conversations and exchanges of messages are related to the search for signs of fraud in electronic voting machines, confirming Valdemar’s direct role in spreading false information about electronic voting machines.”
In , the leader of the party told the PF that the PL questioned the results of the elections due to pressure from Bolsonaro. He also said that the institute never found irregularities, contradicting previous public statements.
The investigation also points out that the work was guided by the presentation of hypotheses by Rocha to Balbino, which would be “theses of evidence of fraud circulating on social media”. And that they were abandoned as they proved to be unfounded.
In one of these examples, Rocha forwards a file called “Urnas – It’s very difficult to justify.pdf”, accompanied by the message: “I received it in another group, interesting”.
The PF also states that people who were working for Rocha’s institute and the PL “supplied false information to influencers, such as the Argentine Fernando Cerimedo”, to spread fake news about the polls. Cerimedo had great reach with lives alleging fraud in 2022.
The PF report makes mention of a report, which showed that three files in a folder on Cerimedo’s Google Drive had been last edited by Balbino, on a date prior to their wide dissemination. And even though one of the files was owned by Angelo Denicoli, a reserve major who was part of the Bolsonaro government.
that he never made or received contact from Cerimedo and that he had received the drive link from Paulo Geus — presented to him by Rocha as an IVL collaborator.
The PF report contains an exchange of messages in which Geus sends the link to a Google Drive folder to Balbino. In another message, Geus says: “The Argentinean, I don’t think he understood Portuguese, so I sent it in English now.”
In 2020, Cerimedo told Sheet not knowing Balbino or Denicoli.
In the final report, the PF reproduces the influencer’s response and says that, despite this, when Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp, needed to obtain Cerimedo’s contact, he requested — and obtained — the Argentine’s contact with Denicoli.
Searched again by SheetCerimedo said he would not make any statements, because he will still defend himself, but reaffirmed to the reporter that he does not know Denicoli. He said that the soldier uploaded a file to a public drive that he published, and that he has “no relationship with the people on that list.”
The report sent a request for position to Carlos Rocha, Angelo Denicoli and the press office, but there was no response until the conclusion of this report.
Mentioned in the report, but not indicted, Paulo Geus and Eder Balbino, were also contacted, but did not respond.
