Electoral Justice rejects more than 10,000 candidates | Choice in numbers

If you add the deaths and resignations, the number of unsuitable candidates exceeds 16,500. The majority, however, some 10,600 cases, are made up of candidates who will not be able to apply because they have not met any legal requirement.

Inappropriate candidates represent around 2.9% of the total cases analyzed, a percentage, for now, lower than that registered in 2016 (3.4%). The deadline for the conclusion of the trials ends on Monday. But 112,000 applications still await an opinion from the Electoral Justice.

According to data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), the main reason for expiration or rejections is the “absence of registration requirement”, with 75.9%. Because a single request can be blocked for more than one reason, the total number exceeds the number of rejected candidates.

The second main reason for rejection of registration applications is the Clean Registry Law, with 11.2%. Under the law, politicians convicted of abuse of political and economic power are ineligible for eight years.

Lawyer and professor of electoral law, Alberto Rollo believes that the data on the trials of the candidates disclosed do not reflect what the electoral legislation recommends. According to him, the law determines that the files must be tried in the first and second electoral courts until 20 days before the voting day, that is, there are many pending trials.

“This means that, until this Monday, applications for the registration of candidacies should have been judged, even by regional courts, because there are many cases with appeal. I think these data reflect more the first instance judgments. We are seeing, in fact, what Minister Barroso already warned back there, that the time was too short for the Electoral Justice to analyze all the requests, ”says Rollo.

In the professor’s evaluation, despite the fact that almost 80% of the cases had been analyzed in the first and second instance, there are still around 112,000 applications without being judged, according to the TSE website. By law, these candidates can run until the Court decides on the validity of the records.

For Alberto Rollo, the proportion of 11% of rejections by the Law to Clean the Registry can be considered low. The teacher values ​​that the percentage should drop a little more, with the resources that must be presented. The absence of a registration requirement, the main reason for disqualification or rejection of applications, according to Rollo, may also be associated with the difficulties generated by the pandemic.

“Many of the documents that the candidate needs to collect to present to the Electoral Justice exist only in physical format, there are millions of documents, which must be found one by one. On the other hand, there are many courts that took over the central office during the pandemic, severely limiting investigative work. Therefore, it is likely that many cases are absent from these documents, ”Rollo recalls.

Small parties stand out

The distribution of inappropriate candidacies, without considering deaths and resignations, shows that small parties stand out. THE G1 calculated the proportion of unsuitable in relation to the total number of applications launched by each legend. In order, parties such as PCO, PSTU, PCB, PMB and DC have percentages above the average.

At the other extreme, the parties with the lowest percentage of challenged candidates were Novo, PP, DEM, PSD and MDB. The political science professor and coordinator of the Laboratory of Parties and Party Systems of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Bruno Bolognesi believes that this distribution reflects the degree of professionalization of the majority parties and the conditions for the establishment of structures in the states and municipalities.

“The first hypothesis for this distribution is, in fact, the level of professionalism and electoral experience. Large parties or those with good structures, like Novo, for example, usually have a robust technical team in campaigns, with lawyers, accountants, publicists. Small parties, on the other hand, are usually held hostage to advisers to the ‘owner’ of the party and who live off patronage relationships within the legend, with little experience in the state bureaucracy, for example, which can help form a know-how for electoral disputes, especially in the formal aspect. requirements ”, observes Bolognesi.

The UFPR professor also draws attention to the ideological profile of the legends that present the highest percentage of contested applications. For Bolognesi, some parties are more concerned with ideological propaganda and less with the actual electoral dispute.

“There is a question from the anti-system party. Although these parties are running for election, they are not necessarily concerned with winning votes, as is the case with far-left parties. So the relationship with the election is much more doctrinal than electoral, so there is no concern for the viability of the candidate, but rather for making ideological propaganda for the caption, ”notes Bolognesi.