Video of a Brazilian voting machine 'voting by itself' is from 2014, not the 2026 runoff

A short video of an empty polling booth, with an electronic voting machine beeping as if it were registering votes on its own, spread widely in Brazil in late October and early November 2026. Captions presented it as proof that the presidential runoff was rigged. Two fact-checking outlets, E-farsas and Estadão Verifica, traced the footage to 2014.

What's being claimed

The posts say the clip was filmed after 5 p.m. during the two extra hours of voting on 25 October 2026, and that the machine was adding votes for one presidential candidate with nobody present. They treat this as direct evidence of electoral fraud. According to Estadão, the clip also fed a wider narrative that the voting extension itself changed the outcome.

What the evidence shows

The video is old. Estadão ran a reverse image search and found the same footage on YouTube on 28 October 2014, nearly twelve years before the 2026 runoff. Both outlets place the incident on 26 October 2014, at section 2 of the 85th Electoral Zone in Torres, Rio Grande do Sul.

The machine was broken, not voting. Per E-farsas, citing Electoral Court (TSE) documents, the polling-station president reported around noon that the machine was jammed. A technician confirmed it was inoperative and replaced it, and voting went on. Estadão adds that the pre-vote zero report showed no votes in the machine. The final tally sheet recorded 310 voters, with 187 votes for Aécio Neves, 108 for Dilma Rousseff, seven blank and eight null. Estadão also says the PSDB reviewed the zero report, tally sheet and station minutes in 2014 and found no evidence of fraud.

A machine can't 'vote alone' by design. Both articles describe the sequence required before a vote is recorded: voter identification, poll-worker authorisation, then the voter entering a candidate number. E-farsas adds that the machine is not connected to an external network, and argues that a hypothetical attacker would not choose a loud beep. That last point is the outlet's reasoning, not a technical test. The procedure itself is described by the fact-checkers; neither article reports an independent audit of the machine.

The extension did not decide the election. Estadão reports that both Lula's and Flávio Bolsonaro's campaigns requested the extra two hours from the TSE. About 34,000 votes were counted after 5 p.m. Lula won with 64.2 million votes to Flávio Bolsonaro's 59.8 million, a gap of 4.4 million. By simple arithmetic, the late votes are orders of magnitude too few to flip that result. The article notes that, although Flávio Bolsonaro questioned the result, his party recognised Lula's victory.

How outlets covered it

Both outlets are fact-checkers and reach the same conclusion, with slightly different framing. E-farsas says the video is real but the fraud claim is false. It stresses the 2014 date and the replaced machine, and offers a video summary. Estadão Verifica labels the post 'misleading' and goes further on documents: the zero report, the tally sheet, the old PSDB audit and the 2026 vote margins. It also links related debunks and mentions checks by Aos Fatos and AFP. One minor difference: E-farsas says the extension was 'given by the STF', while Estadão says the TSE granted it at both campaigns' request. We rely on Estadão's more detailed account. A third item in the set is a Google News aggregation of the E-farsas piece, which adds no independent reporting. No mainstream or pro-fraud outlets were in our set, so we can't compare how those framed the clip.

What we still don't know

The articles don't say who first posted the clip with the 2026 caption, or whether it was deliberately repackaged or shared in good faith. We also lack the TSE documents themselves; we are relying on how the fact-checkers describe them. The broader claims about the 2026 runoff, including the contested result, are addressed only briefly here, and the related fact-checks Estadão links to would be the next place to look.