Venezuela's 2015 extended vote did not hand Maduro a win; the opposition took the legislature

After the runoff that re-elected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, social media users and a prominent congressman compared Brazil's extended voting hours to an extension in Venezuela in 2015. The implication was that extra time signals fraud, and that Nicolás Maduro benefited in Venezuela. According to Estadão Verifica, the Venezuelan example says the opposite of what is claimed.

What's being claimed

Federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) said, in an interview before the result was settled, that voting was extended to 7 pm in Venezuela in 2015 and that Maduro won. After Lula's comeback, he posted a screenshot of a chat with an AI assistant asking whether Venezuela had ever extended voting hours and who won. Estadão Verifica also found Facebook and Instagram posts linking the two extensions to fraud. Some of them suggest that Justice Cristiano Zanin of the Supreme Court (STF) helped the PT campaign by extending voting by two more hours.

What the evidence shows

The central claim is false on the record laid out by Estadão Verifica. The 6 December 2015 vote was a legislative election, not a presidential one. Maduro had been president since 2013 and was not on the ballot. The opposition coalition MUD won 112 seats in the National Assembly, while the governing PSUV remained at 55. The article describes this as the opposition's first win since Chávez came to power.

The extension did happen. The electoral authority extended closing by one hour because voters were still queuing at 6 pm. The article cites contemporary reports that the MUD rejected the extension, with spokespeople warning that it could allow pressure on voters. Even so, the opposition won. Carolina Pedroso, a Unifesp international relations professor who was in Venezuela at the time, calls the comparison with Brazil "disproportionate" and says the 2015 case shows the opposition gaining ground.

On Brazil, the fact-check says the viral posts leave out that Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign also asked the TSE for an extension, first for 17 municipalities in São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina hit by heavy rain, then for cities in Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul. The PT asked the STF and TSE over public transport problems in cities such as Salvador, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The extension applied only where voting had not finished by 5 pm. About 34,700 votes were recorded after that time, around 0.8% of Lula's 4.4 million-vote lead.

How outlets covered it

The two items we received are effectively one: the Estadão Verifica fact-check and an aggregator copy of the same piece under the Estadão name, with no extra reporting. We have no coverage from outlets that back the fraud insinuation, so the claims come from how the fact-check describes the posts and Ferreira's remarks. The fact-check relies on an academic expert, contemporary news reports and reporting by Estadão on the campaigns' requests. It does not name the source of the 34,700-vote figure.

What we still don't know

The version we have is cut off, including a section on Venezuela's 2024 election and electoral security differences. We could not read what it says there. We also do not know the exact legal path of the Brazilian extension, such as who ruled on which request, because the text does not detail it. The article does not say whether Ferreira has responded. Nothing in the material points to fraud in either country's 2015 or 2026 extension, but we have only one fact-check and no independent data from electoral authorities.