RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian hacker claimed at a congressional hearing Thursday that then-President Jair Bolsonaro wanted him to hack into the country’s electronic voting system to expose its alleged weaknesses ahead of the 2022 presidential election.
Walter Delgatti Neto did not provide any evidence for his claim to the parliamentary commission of inquiry. But his detailed testimony raises new allegations against the former far-right leader, who is being investigated for his role in the Jan. 8 riots in the capital city of Brasilia.
Delgatti told lawmakers he met in person with Bolsonaro on Aug. 10, 2022, for between 90 minutes and two hours at the presidential residence. He said he told the leader he could not hack into the electronic voting system because it wasn’t connected to the internet.
The Associated Press asked for comment from Bolsonaro’s lawyers, but they had not responded. Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing.
Bolsonaro’s political nemesis, leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won the Oct. 30, 2022, presidential election with just 50.9% of the votes.
Delgatti said Bolsonaro wanted the attempted hack to show voters that Brazil’s voting system was not reliable.
He said that after he explained why he could not hack into the electoral system, the Bolsonaro campaign asked him to tamper with a borrowed voting machine to make it appear, less than a month before the election’s first round, that the machine had been successfully hacked and results could be compromised. The fraudulent hack was to be shared with news media, Delgatti said, but it was canceled.
When the conversation got too technical, Delgatti said, Bolsonaro referred him to the Ministry of Defense, which the president had told to prepare a report listing potential weaknesses in the voting system for the body that supervises elections.
Delgatti said he met with Ministry of Defense technical experts to discuss the electronic voting system on five occasions. The first time, he said, was right after…
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