2026 ELECTION
Chief electoral justice puts AI on notice
Kassio Nunes Marques, Brazil's chief electoral justice, and editor-in-chief Gustavo Ribeiro. Photo: Novo Selo
Kassio Nunes Marques, Brazil's chief electoral justice, spent Tuesday morning in a meeting with foreign ambassadors in Brasília, telling them how the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) will prevent the use of artificial intelligence to skew the 2026 general elections.
👉 Why it matters. For years, every election cycle has been called "the AI election." In 2026, the label may finally fit: generative AI has made it cheaper and easier than ever to produce sophisticated content built to mislead voters. Campaigns are now deploying it to boost their own candidates and tear down opponents, stoking fears that a flood of fakery could undermine trust in the vote itself.
Nunes Marques's session opened “Debating Brazil,” a diplomats-only series run by The Brazilian Report and PR agency Novo Selo, in which prospective presidential candidates make their case to and senior officials share their knowledge with the foreign corps. Next week, presidential candidates Romeu Zema and Renan Santos are due.
“Freedom of expression,” Nunes Marques said, “protects the dispute of ideas, but does not grant safe conduct for the deliberate falsification of someone else's personality, through the hidden engineering of deception.”
Brazil's chief electoral justice cast the danger in constitutional terms. Brazil must meet AI “in the light of our Constitution,” he said, and “the contemporary challenge is to ensure that innovation serves the freedom of the vote and not the manipulation of the popular will.”
The court has already moved from principle to rule. It has barred AI-generated content — true or false — in the 72 hours before polls open, and reversed the burden of proof in election complaints, so that the burden falls on whoever posts disputed synthetic material rather than on the accuser. “The problem is not that AI exists,” Nunes Marques said, “but that it can be used in an opaque, manipulative and discriminatory way, fraudulently.”
Ahead of the bitterly contested 2022 race, former President Jair Bolsonaro used a meeting with foreign ambassadors in Brasília to cast doubt on the electronic voting system, pitching his claims to the diplomats whose dispatches shape how the world reads Brazil.
Nunes Marques came to the same kind of room to set the record straight: Brazil's elections, he made clear, are free and fair. He dwelt on the scale of the feat — a simultaneous vote for 158 million voters across a continental country with remote regions, counted within hours and free of any credible claim of fraud.
Brazil hands its elections not to state officials, as the US does, but to a dedicated arm of the judiciary: the TSE. One institution registers voters, runs the count, certifies the winner and tries the disputes — a concentration of power built to keep partisans out and apply one standard nationwide.
In Brazil, trust is also a matter of technology, and Nunes Marques walked the diplomats through it. After months of testing, he explained, each piece of voting software is sealed in a public ceremony and stamped with a unique “hash” — a fingerprint published online to match the code that runs on election day.
“Any alteration, even a minimal one, would produce a different code and would be immediately detected,” he said. His point: in Brazil, suspicion is meant to be verifiable, not merely asserted.
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