Brazil’s military has found no sign of fraud in the country’s 2022 elections, according to a new report released this week.  But concerns remain that the report could fuel tensions among supporters of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly made unsubstantiated allegations of possible campaign fraud.   

  Left-wing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a presidential runoff last month, sending some supporters of far-right Bolsonaro onto the streets in anger.   

  This week’s report, released by Brazil’s defense ministry, found no fraud or inconsistency in the election process, but refused to rule it out entirely.   

  Instead, he described the potential for a hypothetical security threat in the programming code for Brazil’s electronic voting machines.  Because his audit did not have full access to the programs’ source code, the Defense Department could not rule out the influence of malicious code, he said.   

  “It is not possible to guarantee that the programs executed on the electronic voting machines are free from malicious introductions that alter their operation,” the ministry said, offering no evidence that such issues existed.  The ministry also called on Brazil’s Electoral Court to conduct its own investigation.   

  In a statement published on the court’s website, the head of the electoral authority Alexandre de Moraes wrote that the court “received with satisfaction the final report from the Ministry of Defense, which, like all other supervisory bodies, did not point to the existence of fraud or fraud .  inconsistency in electronic voting machines and the 2022 election process”.   

  “The proposals forwarded to improve the system will be analyzed in due course,” he added.   

  Meanwhile, President-elect da Silva condemned the military’s involvement as “deplorable” during a conference Thursday with political allies in Brasilia.   

  “Yesterday, something humiliating, deplorable happened to our armed forces.  A president of the republic, who is the supreme commander of the Armed Forces, had no right to involve the Armed Forces in setting up a commission to investigate electronic ballots, which is something for civil society, political parties and the national Congress,” he said, referring to Bolsonaro.   

  João Cezar de Castro Rocha, a professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, told CNN he believed there was an “underhand strategy” for the report to cast doubt on the election results.   

  “In this particular case, the deliberately ambiguous tone of the Ministry of Defense – ‘there is no evidence of fraud, but it is said that there may be fraud!’  – aims to keep (Bolsonaro’s) supporters motivated,” he added.   

  Bolsonaro, a former army captain who made much of his ties to Brazil’s military, has not publicly commented on the report or its origins.  Asked about the CNN report, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party declined to comment.