engineer Carlos Rocha says, in a defense sent to the Attorney General’s Office, that he carried out technical work on the reliability of electronic voting machines and that the political use of his conclusions is the responsibility of the PL, chaired by Valdemar Costa Neto.
“There is no evidence that [Rocha] has used the results of its analyzes for political purposes or to support coup narratives. […] Any political use of documents goes beyond Carlos Rocha’s responsibility and falls exclusively on the contractor [o PL]”, says the defense, signed by lawyers Gladys Nascimento and Melillo Dinis do Nascimento.
was hired by PL in the 2022 election to analyze electronic voting machines, which were frequently attacked by the then president (PL), a candidate for re-election.
Based on its conclusions, which highlighted vulnerabilities in the system, the party filed a lawsuit with the Superior Electoral Court asking for the invalidation of part of the votes in the election, which gave victory to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
In another part of his defense, Rocha says that “all stages of the electoral inspection project were personally approved by the national president of the Liberal Party, Valdemar Costa Neto”.
The engineer was indicted on charges of contributing to discrediting the voting system, paving the way for the coup attempt sponsored by Bolsonaro’s allies after his defeat.
He says that the PF report “is based solely on subjective conclusions, without any support in facts and concrete evidence”.
“Never, at any point in his work, did the accused, for example, use the word or mention any ‘fraud'”, argues the defense brief.
Rocha also says that he based his study for the PL on technical documents that showed weaknesses in the ballot boxes, produced by State institutions such as the Superior Electoral Court and the Federal Audit Court.
The engineer also states that he had technical meetings with the TSE several times to present his arguments, but that on some occasions requests for an agenda were denied by the court.
He also refutes one of the main pieces of evidence presented by the PF, expressing disagreement with the conclusion that there had been fraud.
Balbino’s WhatsApp messages, according to Rocha’s defense, were “obtained in an irregular and decontextualized manner”.
“The accusations are based on private messages extracted from Eder Balbino’s cell phone through evidentiary fishing, an illegal practice repudiated by Brazilian jurisprudence,” he declared.
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