Supreme Court Justice Cármen Lúcia will step down early as chief electoral justice, before her term officially ends in June. When announcing her decision, she said she wanted to give her successor, Justice Nunes Marques, more than the 100 days he would otherwise have had to prepare for October's general elections. The new leadership will be formally elected next week, to take office in May.
Unlike the US, where state executive agencies run elections, Brazil entrusts the task to a permanent judicial body designed to insulate the process from partisan influence. As a result, the same institution that organizes elections also adjudicates disputes.
This system is headed by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), tasked with ensuring that elections are conducted the same way all over the country, from the wealthiest neighborhoods of São Paulo to the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, and everywhere in between.
The TSE has seven sitting justices (and seven alternates), arranged as follows:
3 from the Supreme Court, one of whom serves as chief electoral justice, with all three having two-year terms;
2 from the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), the country’s second-highest judicial body, who also serve for two years;
2 lawyers, eligible for up to two consecutive two-year terms.
👉 Why it matters. The TSE is central to holding free and fair elections in Brazil. In 2022, under Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the court repelled false claims about the country’s electronic voting machines and helped dismantle a voter-suppression operation by the former Jair Bolsonaro administration — in which the Federal Highway Police erected election-day roadblocks in states that lean toward Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the vote by a whisker.
This year, all three Supreme Court justices serving on the TSE have ties to Bolsonaro — raising questions about how they will act in what promises to be a volatile and unpredictable election.
Nunes Marques
Poised to take over as chief electoral justice, Justice Nunes Marques was Bolsonaro's first Supreme Court pick. Low-profile and reliably aligned with Bolsonarism on sensitive cases, he takes a more permissive stance on speech — a priority for the far right, whose political strategy is built on social media.
André Mendonça
His deputy will be André Mendonça, a former justice minister under Bolsonaro with even deeper far-right ties. During his time in the cabinet, he helped oversee an operation to monitor the online activity of federal workers, journalists and politicians deemed enemies of the administration.
Dias Toffoli
Appointed to the court by Lula in 2009, Toffoli has since cultivated closer ties to Bolsonarism. As Supreme Court chief justice, he downplayed the 1964 military coup — a gesture to Bolsonaro, who is openly nostalgic for the dictatorship period.
In 2019, he suspended an embezzlement investigation against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro by ruling that COAF, Brazil's money laundering enforcement agency, cannot produce evidence without a prior judicial order — even though such reports typically form the basis for court orders in the first place. Toffoli is now deeply implicated in the Banco Master scandal, yet Flávio Bolsonaro, who is running for president this year, has been conspicuously silent about him.
