This desk spends most of its autumn on one country's election. This column is about another, because on Sunday, October 25, Brazil finishes choosing a president, and the way it does so is worth understanding from the outside.
The facts first. On October 4, Brazilians voted for president, for governors, for all 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and for 54 of the 81 seats in the Senate. The electoral court counted 158.7 million eligible voters. Twelve candidates ran for president. When the count was done, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the right-wing Liberal Party had about 47 percent of the valid votes and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party had about 45, or roughly 56 million votes to almost 53 million. Because neither cleared half, the two meet again on Sunday.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is simple. For president and for governor, a Brazilian candidate must win more than 50 percent in the first round. If no one does, the top two advance to a second round, where one of them necessarily will. The design guarantees that the winner has a majority behind them, which most American races, decided by whoever finishes first, do not.
The design also produces something I find fascinating: a first round that works as the largest, most expensive, and most accurate poll a country can run. This year it contradicted the actual polls. Datafolha's final survey, published the day before the vote, had Lula at 45 percent and Bolsonaro at 42 among valid votes; Quaest had Lula five points ahead. Bolsonaro instead led the count from start to finish. Lula admitted afterward that he had expected to win outright, and then reframed the night: the second round, he said, "is the real test." Bolsonaro's reading was shorter. "Brazil wants change," he said.
A runoff is won in two places. The first is among the people who voted for someone else. The other ten candidates took about 8 percent of the valid vote between them, and two of them, Ronaldo Caiado and Renan Santos, who together won about 5.3 million votes, have said they will not endorse either finalist. Those voters are now free agents. The second place is turnout. Voting in Brazil is compulsory for citizens between 18 and 70, with a fine for abstaining, yet about 21 percent of the electorate abstained in 2022. Voting is optional, and open, from age 16, which means Brazilians the age of this paper's readers had a ballot on October 4.
The stakes are not only about personalities, though the personalities are large. Flávio Bolsonaro's father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for attempting a coup, and the son has promised him amnesty if he wins. The first round also reshaped Congress: right-wing parties performed strongly in both houses, with the Liberal Party on track to become the largest force in the Chamber of Deputies. Whoever wins Sunday will govern alongside that legislature, and a president's agenda in Brazil, as anywhere, lives or dies there.
I will not predict the result; this desk inherited a policy on predictions, and the first round has just demonstrated why. What I take from Brazil is a lesson about listening. Polls are a way of asking people what they will do. A first round is a way of watching what they did. The two disagreed by several points this month, and the country now gets a second chance to say what it meant, this time to just two names.
Americans vote nine days later, in a system with no second round for most races. Whatever we say on November 3, we say once.
