Understanding Your Vote

In October 2026, more than 150 million Brazilians will go to the polls. They will elect a president, senators, federal deputies, governors, state deputies, and city councillors — all on a single Sunday (the first round), in a collective exercise of popular sovereignty that few countries in the world manage to organize at such scale and speed. And yet, recent surveys show that a significant share of the electorate does not know, with any certainty, what each office they are voting for actually does. This column is not about whom to vote for, but about understanding exactly what one is voting for — and through that understanding, knowing how to make the best choice available, and once that choice is made, how to properly monitor and pressure each officeholder.

The republic of three branches

Brazil is a federative presidential republic. This means that national power is divided into three autonomous branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. The head of the executive — the president — is not a prime minister drawn from parliament, as in England, but a representative directly elected by the population, with independent powers and a fixed term.These three branches exist to limit one another. The executive governs but does not legislate alone. The legislature passes laws but does not enforce them. The judiciary interprets the Constitution but neither governs nor legislates. In practice, this separation is never perfect, and much of Brazilian politics is made precisely in the gaps between the three. When executive aggrandizement occurs — whereby the other branches are directly hollowed out or co-opted — we say that the quality of democracy has declined. In extreme cases of power imbalance, unfortunately increasingly common around the world, we say the country is undergoing a process of autocratization.The division of powers has not always been as it is today, and contrary to what our national anthem suggests, there is nothing natural about the construction of a territory, the separation of powers, and so forth. All of this requires political action and constant vigilance. In less democratic periods of our history, we had a fourth branch — the Moderating Power — which functioned in practice as a power superior to the others, with the capacity for censorship. Over time, through successive constitutions, culminating in the current Constitution of 1988 (known as the Citizen's Constitution), the Moderating Power ceased to exist and the three remaining branches became formally equal.Furthermore, being a federative republic also means that the territory is organized into federal entities with their own autonomy. In Brazil's case, these are the Union, the states, and the municipalities. Countries that are not federations tend, in general, to concentrate more power at the national level, granting less autonomy to the country's subdivisions. Autonomy is not independence, of course. Federal entities still answer to the Constitution, do not have their own armies, and so on. It was precisely the pursuit of independence beyond mere autonomy that led the Cisplatine Province to fight for separation from Brazil, thus becoming Uruguay.

The president and the federal executive

The president of the Republic is elected by the votes of Brazilian citizens residing in Brazil or abroad with no time limit (unlike Ireland, for example, where Irish citizens residing abroad for more than six months cannot vote), in two rounds when no candidate obtains an absolute majority in the first. The term is four years, with the right to one consecutive re-election. Brazilian democracy is therefore representative. In places where the people propose and vote directly on laws — as in Switzerland, for example — democracy is direct.The president is the head of state — representing Brazil internationally — and the head of government — commanding the federal administrative apparatus. In countries like Finland, for example, the head of state is the president and the head of government is the prime minister, dividing powers that Brazil, and many other countries, particularly in Latin America, concentrate in the figure of the president. It is the president who appoints ministers, sets budgetary priorities, enacts or vetoes laws passed by Congress, and conducts foreign policy (although many commentators and analysts point to the technocracy and elitism of the Brazilian diplomatic career as the source of foreign policy's separation from the country's other public policies). Presidential power is considerable, but not unlimited: Congress can override vetoes, pass laws against the president's wishes, and, in extreme cases, initiate impeachment proceedings.Alongside the president, the vice president is also elected — who assumes office in the event of incapacitation or death — and, indirectly, the composition of the ministries is shaped; these are the operational arms of the executive: Finance, Health, Education, Foreign Affairs, and dozens of others. In the Philippines, for example, president and vice president are elected separately, which has generated, throughout the country's history, situations of considerable political friction — as in the election of Duterte as president and Robredo as vice president.

The National Congress: chamber and senate

The federal legislative power is bicameral — composed of two chambers: the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate. Both must approve any bill for it to become federal law. In October, the Chamber is elected in full and one third of the Senate is renewed.The Chamber of Deputies has 513 members, elected by state in proportion to population. São Paulo, the most populous state, elects 70 deputies; Roraima, the least populous, elects 8. Within each state, seats are distributed among parties proportionally to the votes each party received in that state. If the PT received 20% of the votes in São Paulo, for example, it takes approximately 20% of the 70 São Paulo seats — around 14 seats. Those 14 seats would then be filled by the PT members who received the most individual votes. This is how we get deputies associated with health, evangelicals, truck drivers, or agribusiness — each cultivating a niche to justify individual votes.This system is called an open list, and it is distinct from the closed list used in Argentina and Israel, for example, where the party decides which of its members fill the seats the party has won. It is also different from the single-member district system used in the US and the UK, where each district elects a single representative.The term of a federal deputy is four years. Federal deputies are the elected representatives numerically closest to the ordinary electorate — and it is they who initiate most bills, jointly control the federal budget alongside the executive, and hold the power to authorize or block proceedings against the president.The Federal Senate has 81 senators — three per state, regardless of population size, thereby guaranteeing equal representation for each federal unit. The term is eight years, with alternating renewals every four years: sometimes one third, sometimes two thirds of the Senate is renewed. The Senate holds powers the Chamber does not: it approves appointments to positions such as Supreme Court justices and Central Bank directors, ratifies international treaties, and tries the president in impeachment proceedings.

The parties — and why there are so many

Brazil has, today, more than thirty parties with representation in Congress. For anyone accustomed to two-party systems like the American one, this may seem like chaos. It is not — but it has its complications.Brazil's multiparty system stems from a combination of historical and institutional factors. The re-democratization of the 1980s was deliberately designed to prevent the concentration of power that had characterized the dictatorship. Electoral rules — especially the proportional system with open lists, in which the voter casts a ballot for the candidate rather than just the party — incentivize fragmentation and political personalism (which partly explains why many parties appear to lack a clear and coherent policy vision). The result is a parliament in which no party can achieve a majority on its own, which forces any president to permanently negotiate with dozens of parties in order to govern. This arrangement has a name: coalition presidentialism.Coalition has become a dirty word in the popular imagination, but as a political design it reflects an inherently democratic concern: the protection of minorities. When governing through coalition, the government must represent a plurality of interests, not only those expressed by the party with the most votes.In practice, Brazilian parties cluster into relatively recognizable groupings. On the left: the PT, PSOL, and PDT. In the centre: the MDB, União Brasil, and PSD — parties that have historically aligned themselves with whoever is in power. On the right: the PL, PP, and Republicanos. Do not be misled by the names; in Brazil they function more as marketing strategies than as rigorous descriptions. These boundaries are, of course, porous: party migrations are frequent, and alliances that appear ideologically contradictory are common when what is at stake is the distribution of offices and budgetary resources. The porousness of party boundaries is a product of a weakly institutionalized party system — a characteristic common to countries shaped by extractive colonization.

Governors and state assemblies

In October, the governors of all 26 states and the Federal District are also elected, alongside the state legislative assemblies. The governor is to the state what the president is to the Union: commanding the state executive, appointing secretaries (the state-level equivalent of ministers), and managing the state budget. The state legislative assemblies function as state chambers — they pass laws that apply within the state, oversee the governor, and play a crucial role in policies such as public security, transportation, and supplementary health care.

Mayors, municipal chambers, and city councillors

The municipality is the smallest federal entity in Brazil — and, for most citizens, the one most present in everyday life. Waste collection, public lighting, urban transport, health clinics, municipal schools: all of this falls under municipal jurisdiction. The mayor commands the municipal executive, appoints municipal secretaries, and administers the municipal budget. The legislative counterpart is the municipal chamber, composed of city councillors.City councillors are the elected representatives closest to the citizen — and the most accessible. They are elected under the same open-list proportional system used for federal and state deputies, but at the municipal level. They pass municipal laws, oversee the mayor, and play a direct role in matters such as urban zoning, local commercial regulations, and the governance of municipal public services.In October 2026, however, mayors and city councillors will not be elected — those offices were renewed in the municipal elections of 2024 and carry four-year terms. This is an important detail: voters will receive five ballots in October, not six.

What else is not elected in October

The judiciary is not elected. Supreme Court justices are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate — a process that connects the two elected branches to the apex of the justice system, while keeping magistrates insulated from popular vote. This distance is intentional: judges are expected to apply the law without depending on electoral approval. If judges depended on the vote, they would have incentives to decide according to the popular opinion of the moment, rather than according to the Constitution.

One election, many choices

In October, each Brazilian voter will cast ballots for up to five different offices: president, senator, federal deputy, governor, and state deputy (citizens not residing in Brazil vote only for president). These are five votes that simultaneously construct two spheres of power — federal and state — and two distinct branches: the executive and the legislative. Few electoral systems in the world demand so much of the citizen in a single day.This complexity is not a flaw in the system. It is, to a certain extent, the price of plural representation — of the attempt to ensure that distinct interests, at distinct scales, have their own institutional channels. The president is accountable for national policies; the governor, for state policies; the federal deputy, for legislation governing the life of the country; the state deputy, for legislation governing the life of the state; and the senator, for the balance among the federal entities.Knowing what each office does does not resolve the question of whom to vote for. But it is the minimum starting point for a vote to be, in fact, a choice — and not merely a gesture. And once the choice is made, it is knowledge about each office that allows citizens to know whom to complain to, whom to pressure, and whom to hold accountable when things do not work as they should.

The electronic voting machine

Voting in Brazil today takes an average of forty seconds. What may seem trivial to some is in fact the culmination of a technological development aimed at combating a long history of electoral fraud while simultaneously accelerating vote-counting in a country of continental dimensions such as ours.During the First Republic, allegations of electoral manipulation were constant — and there was not even an Electoral Court to receive them. Local political bosses (coronéis) made ballot boxes disappear to alter results, created "ghost votes" through falsified documents, and used physical and psychological violence to coerce voters. The canvas ballot box — the paper-based voting system that preceded the electronic machine — was structurally vulnerable: pre-filled ballots could be deposited before voting began, meaning the box would arrive at the polling station already "pregnant"; ballots from the security stock could be filled in and inserted during the day; and canvas ballot boxes could be swapped for others, with different votes, during transport to the counting location.

Brazil was the world pioneer in electronic voting, introduced in the municipal elections of 1996. The equipment is developed entirely in Brazil, has no connection to the internet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth, and operates in isolation to guarantee the integrity of the vote.The system is not merely closed: it is auditable at multiple layers. The opening of the voting machine's source code is a mandatory procedure, carried out by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) one year before each election, as required by the Electoral Law (Law nº 9.504/1997). The audit has been conducted since 2002 and may be followed by political parties, the Electoral Public Prosecution, the Brazilian Bar Association, and the Brazilian Computer Society, among others. Since 2009, the Public Security Test (TPS) has been held periodically — an open invitation for specialists to attempt to find vulnerabilities in the system. Any Brazilian citizen over the age of 18 may submit an attack plan. Since 2009, no vulnerability capable of compromising election results has ever been found.This did not prevent fraud narratives from circulating regularly — particularly after 2018 — largely fed deliberately by political actors interested in delegitimizing unfavourable electoral outcomes. In May 2022, following statements by Jair Bolsonaro announcing a private audit of the voting machines, interactions involving the topic appeared 583,000 times on Facebook pages and public groups in just seven days. The mechanism is clear: disinformation about the voting machines does not need to prove fraud — it only needs to sow enough doubt for an electoral defeat to appear illegitimate. It is a strategy documented across multiple contexts of democratic erosion around the world, and Brazil was no exception.

A history of ideologies in power in Brazil

Another area that is continually targeted by fake news is the political history of the country. Understanding who has governed Brazil throughout its history requires an initial caveat: the categories of left and right are historical, not universal. What was understood as conservatism during the Second Empire has little in common with what is called the right in the twenty-first century, just as nineteenth-century liberalism is not the liberalism of today. With that caveat in mind, it is possible to sustain a relatively robust thesis: Brazil has, for most of its political history, been governed by forces that — in the terms of each era — represented the preservation of the established order, the interests of dominant elites, and the containment of popular demands. To put it plainly: in the understanding of each epoch, Brazil has been a country historically governed by the "right." The exceptions are instructive precisely because they are exceptions.Independence in 1822 did not alter the country's social structure. Brazil remained a slaveholding monarchy, governed by a landowning and commercial elite that vied for space with the Portuguese crown — and later with the emperor himself. For most of the nineteenth century, Brazil had two main political parties: the Conservative Party, nicknamed the saquaremas, and the Liberal Party, nicknamed the luzias. One of the main points of contention between the two groups was the debate over centralization versus decentralization: the Conservatives defending greater control from Rio de Janeiro over the country, and the Liberals defending greater autonomy for the provinces. In practice, however, both defended very similar policies when in power.The First Republic consolidated, under republican garb, the same domination by agrarian elites that had characterized the Empire, alongside a military that had come to regard itself as the guardian of "good politics." Most presidents of the Old Republic represented the interests of the São Paulo and Minas Gerais oligarchies. The arrangement was self-explanatory: the política dos governadores (politics of the governors) allowed economically dominant oligarchies to secure their presence in the main federal government posts through an exchange of favours between the federal government, state governments, and local political bosses — ensuring that the same groups holding economic power maintained political control of the nation. There was no substantive ideological tension in this system — only competition among oligarchic factions for access to the state. There was not even an Electoral Court to receive the constant allegations of manipulation. The Revolution of 1930, which ended the Old Republic, was itself a movement of dissident oligarchies — from Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais — aggrieved by the breakdown of the coffee-with-milk pact, not a popular uprising. Getúlio Vargas came to power through a coup, not through the ballot box.Getúlio Vargas is the figure most difficult to fit into any simple ideological framework in Brazilian history — and for that very reason he is the most revealing. Vargas implemented labour policies such as the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (CLT, Brazil's consolidated labour code) and the minimum wage, winning popular support, while simultaneously subordinating trade unions to the state and repressing opponents. His regime — especially the Estado Novo — exhibited authoritarian and corporatist characteristics, approximating European fascist models. By granting rights through the state and presenting himself as mediator between capital and labour, Vargas sought to create a dependency between the working class and the government, hollowing out the power of left-wing organizations and independent unions. Trabalhismo (laborism) was also a strategy of hegemonic construction, with the state assuming the role of tutor and provider of the popular classes, reinforcing the image of Vargas as a benevolent and nationalist leader.The democratic period between the end of the Estado Novo and the military coup was marked by growing tension between conservative forces — civilian and military — and governments with reformist inclinations. Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946–1951) was an explicit conservative, an ally of the United States during the Cold War and responsible for outlawing the Communist Party in 1947. The second Vargas government (1951–1954) and, subsequently, those of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961) and João Goulart (1961–1964) represented variations of a national-developmentalist project that included, to varying degrees, social reforms and resistance to automatic alignment with Washington. It was precisely this reformist vector that the coup of 1964 came to interrupt: marshalling accusations of corruption and anti-communism — the typical mix of the right — the military and their civilian allies overthrew Goulart before the reformas de base (basic reforms) — agrarian, urban, educational — could be implemented.The twenty-one years of military dictatorship were the longest period of unambiguously right-wing government in Brazilian republican history. The regime combined economic developmentalism — with high growth rates during the "miracle" of 1968–1973 (which would subsequently give rise to the substantial hyperinflation and poverty that followed) — with systematic repression of trade unions, social movements, the press, and opposition parties. The two-party system imposed by the regime — Arena and MDB — was not ideological competition, but control of representation. The transition to democracy was itself conducted from the top down, "slow, gradual, and safe," in the words of General Ernesto Geisel himself: the forces that had sustained the regime remained influential in civilian politics for decades.The first presidents elected after the dictatorship — Sarney and Collor — were figures originating from the conservative camp. The period of PT electoral dominance between 2002 and 2016 represented the only significant interruption in this long historical tendency — and even then, as part of the literature argues, the PT governed in coalition with conservative forces, maintained the pillars of economic orthodoxy, and was unable to reverse structures of inequality dating back to the colonial period. The return of the right to power with Temer in 2016 and Bolsonaro in 2018 can be read, in this long historical perspective, not as a rupture but as a restoration.This is the structural tendency of a country shaped by extractive colonization, with a weakly institutionalized party system and high concentrations of income and land. In this context, it is to be expected that power orbits around the elites that manage to translate their interests into legitimate political language — whether the monarchical conservatism of the nineteenth century, the oligarchic republicanism of the Old Republic, the authoritarian corporatism of Vargas, the military anti-communism of the 1960s, or the neoliberalism and right-wing populism of the recent period. The form changes; the tendency endures.There are many other subjects relevant to the elections, but I hope that with this simple introduction the reader feels a little more capable of deciding on the future of the country — and that through it they come to appreciate the importance of participating. Regardless of whom you will vote for, vote! Brazilian democracy is grateful.

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