Brazilians will go to the polls this Sunday (Oct. 25) to elect its president and the governors of six states in the second round of elections. About 158.7 million voters are eligible to vote, according to figures from the Electoral Court.
The race for the presidency will be between incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party (PL).
Voting begins at 8 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. Brasília time.
Voter profile
The 2026 elections will feature the largest electorate in Brazilian history. Of the total number of eligible voters, 141,321,493 have registered their biometric data, equivalent to 89.01 percent of the electorate.
According to the Superior Electoral Court, there are 605,800 voters aged 16 and just over 1 million voters aged 17 – age groups for whom voting is optional. Voting is also optional for citizens aged 70 or older, as well as for illiterate voters.
Candidates
The election is also marked by a large number of candidates. The Electoral Court has registered approximately 21,000 candidacy applications. More than half of these are concentrated in the elections for state legislatures and the Federal District Legislative Chamber.
There are approximately 11,300 candidates for state representative and 433 for district representative, totaling about 11,700 candidates for these positions.
For the lower house, 7,803 candidates were registered.
Hard-fought democracy
The right to vote has not always existed for all Brazilians. Throughout the country’s history, various groups have been excluded from the electoral process. Women, illiterate people, indigenous people, and the poor have, at various times, been barred from participating in elections.
More recently, during the institutional breakdown brought about by the military dictatorship, voting rights and political rights were restricted, and candidacies were revoked amid indirect elections for certain offices.
Illiterate citizens regained the right to vote in 1985. Political rights, meanwhile, were enshrined in the Federal Constitution of 1988.
In this context, it is the responsibility of the Electoral Court to organize the electoral process in a way that guarantees the exercise of the right to vote as a pillar of Brazilian democracy.