Overview
- The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral reported a second-round abstention rate of 19.21% after voting on Sunday, October 25, down from 21.08% in the Oct. 4 first round, a decline of about 1.87 percentage points.
- Official tallies show Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva added about 10.35 million raw votes between rounds while Flávio Bolsonaro added about 3.71 million, flipping a first-round shortfall into a multi-million vote victory for Lula.
- Blank and null votes fell sharply between rounds, which together with the higher turnout increased the number of valid votes by roughly 4.9 million and helped boost Lula’s advantage.
- A late judicial order from STF minister Cristiano Zanin to extend voting where polls were still open followed complaints from Lula’s campaign about transport problems, paused TSE totalization and drew protests from Flávio Bolsonaro’s team.
- Turnout shifts varied widely by state with large abstention drops in parts of the Northeast including Bahia and Pernambuco and notable increases in several Northern states such as Amapá, Roraima and Acre, and outlets offered different historical comparisons for how low the runoff abstention was.