Brazil's historic election reversal sparks vote-rigging allegations, suspicious new accounts on prediction markets profit millions of dollars.

According to PolyBeats monitoring, on October 25, Brazil's Superior Electoral Court confirmed that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the second round of the presidential election. In the first round, Lula trailed by a narrow margin, but in the second round, Lula instead pulled ahead by a margin of about 4.4 million votes. Multiple reports noted: since direct elections were reopened in 1989, this is the first time someone has trailed in the first round but come back to win the presidency in the second round.

On the prediction market Polymarket, Lula's probability of winning previously fell as low as 10.5%, and was 18.5% on the day the results were announced. PolyBeats reported on October 23 that traders in this market showed a clear profile distinction: smart money was mostly on the side of Lula losing, while those who believed he would win were mostly newly registered accounts making large bets; among them, Abkhauae and eventalpha26 traded only in this market, making a total profit of $1.77M. (Original link: https://t.me/PolyBeats_Bot/2109)

Because this election broke historical patterns, manipulation and questioning of public opinion quickly intensified. Lula's opponent Flávio said that night that it was "impossible to recognize this result," and said he would apply through his legal team to annul this election. During the campaign, Flávio linked Brazil's ballot boxes to a company related to Venezuela, and the TSE repeatedly publicly denied that the company supplied or programmed Brazil's voting machines; fact-checks by Estadão Verifica and others also refuted claims such as "votes can be changed during the transmission stage" and "a large number of box replacements near the end equals fraud," pointing out that digital signatures and the contingency ballot box process do not support such conclusions.