Brazil’s close-run general elections, which concluded at the end of October 2022, showed an explosive rise in cases of voter harassment and attempts to buy workers’ votes. The Public Labour Prosecution Office (MPT), which is responsible for receiving this type of complaint, received 2,549 allegations this time around – up from 212 during the 2018 elections. Virtually all were about employers – from multinational companies to small entrepreneurs – harassing or bribing their employees to vote for the incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who ended up losing by less than two percentage points to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT).
In the state of Pará, the owner of a brick and tile company promised $40 per worker’s vote if Bolsonaro were re-elected. He was forced by the MPT to pay a fine and recant his offer in public. In Bahia, an entrepreneur from the agricultural sector who had asked, on video, for other rural producers to fire ‘without mercy’ any employees who voted for Lula had to pay compensation and apologize. The shipyard of a luxury boat manufacturer in Santa Catarina state reached an agreement with the MPT to pay nearly $60,000 in compensation for harassing its employees to vote for Bolsonaro.
