Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Election will be decided on the coin and in the war of abstention

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“It will be in the penny”, says a social scientist friend of the polls in the second round of the election. That is, the election is so tight that the Imponderável da Silva of statistics tells us that we cannot rule out a result close to a tie between Lula da Silva (PT) and Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

It is not possible to make projections on the number of abstentions and valid votes, which will be relevant and probably decisive. The battle for free (or not) public transport will intensify. Electoral harassment is being denounced in droves, but we also don’t know the extent of this violence in companies, public service and, who knows, in areas controlled by militias and other criminal factions.

Will it increase or decrease? Who is afraid of punishment? Electoral crimes are judged belatedly, if at all. There are people who lose their mandate almost at the end of the government.

Abstention in the second round is usually higher. On average, the number of people who go to the polls in the second round of voting is 2.6% less than in the first. At least it has been that way since 2006, just to mention more recent elections (and remembering that in 1994 and 1998 there was no second round in the presidential race). The political-electoral environment has changed so much that the previous elections seem to have taken place in another country — in fact, that was the case.

If the average increase in abstention between the two rounds were repeated in this 2022 election, there would be 3.2 million fewer voters. It can totally mess up the search results.

But these numbers only serve to indicate how unpredictable the dispute has become. Note: the difference between Lula and Bolsonaro is now around 4 percentage points in the Datafolha poll. The difference in the first round was between 4 and 5 points, depending on how the TSE results are calculated.

Anyway, this average increase in abstention is just that: average. It ranged from at least 1.2% in the second round of the 2018 election (Bolsonaro against Fernando Haddad, PT) to 4.3% in 2010 (Dilma Rousseff, PT, against José Serra, PSDB). What will be in this 2022?

As Manuel Bandeira said about another matter of life and death, this “calculation of probabilities is a joke”. In addition to not being able to predict which type of voter will stop voting on October 30th, we also don’t know if the vote in the second round will be as decided as in the first. That is, we have no way of knowing the number of nulls and blanks, which was the lowest since 1989.

In the first round of 2022, the share of invalid votes was only 4.4%, compared to an average of almost 9% since 2006. It’s a brutal difference. Again: it is as big as the difference between Lula and Bolsonaro in the Datafolha released this Wednesday.

From 2006 to 2014, the number of invalid votes decreased in the second round. In the last election, in 2018, it increased. Sign of greater rejection to the two finalists? It’s a kick. Will the phenomenon repeat itself this year? It’s a worse kick.

The difference between Lula and Bolsonaro would be almost zero, at the unlikely limit of the margin of error in the Datafolha poll released this Wednesday. But there are other errors. The camouflage of the most militant Bolsonarista voter, the close vote or the refusal to respond to the survey, is still a hypothesis on the table, among other possible problems. It may be that Bolsonaro’s new supporters, who voted for other candidates in the first round, are less likely to resort to camouflage. But the campaign against polls may have engaged new voters.

We’re right in the dark.

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