Yet another Hacker News

Lula wins election after final votes tallied

182 points laurenth 2 hours ago 146 comments

abdelhousni 1 hour ago | parent

Fascism loses, maybe there is hope for the rest of the world.

hellgas00 55 minutes ago | parent

"Lula's re-election will strengthen Brazil's ties with Russia, Brazilian Workers Party congressman Reimont Otoni told TASS"

The world is more complex than "fascist" vs "communist"

free_bip 53 minutes ago | parent

Are you taking this single congressman's word as fact?

hellgas00 45 minutes ago | parent

https://www.barrons.com/news/lula-calls-to-strengthen-strate...

Literally Lula said as much

"We are interested in discussing the defence area, the space area, the scientific and technological area, the education area, and especially, the energy issue area," Lula said.

cowlevel 43 minutes ago | parent

I don't know enough about their available options to know how bad this is.

dietr1ch 35 minutes ago | parent

I get that BRICS is world-domination wise scary to the US, but I don't really think the rest of the world fears that sans the US's warmongering.

hellgas00 26 minutes ago | parent

Tbh don’t really care which side is right (some of Lula's politics I like and other not). I’m just pointing out the mental gymnastics HN goes through to paint one group as “fascist,” while completely ignoring the grey areas that don’t fit their cleancut worldview.

matheusmoreira 17 minutes ago | parent

Bolsonaro was also friendly towards Russia. Any president will be. Brazil depends on their fertilizers.

brazukadev 1 hour ago | parent

Really unexpected.

Polymarket was like 80% Bolsonaro Jr to 20% Lula 7pm, 7:15 it changed to 60% Lula. There were multiple reports in the news websites about it favoring Bolsonaro which itself probably made some people vote for him.

I'm quite happy with the result tho. Let's see how the far right opposition will take this loss. I'm already expecting the worse.

mulderc 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe these prediction markets are less useful than has been claimed.

medellin 1 hour ago | parent

They are good at some markets but they don’t understand latam and especially Brazilian politics in the least so whatever makes it into the US news drives the market although it is normally wrong

smuhakg 1 hour ago | parent

If he has an 80% chance to win that means Polymarket will be "wrong" 20% of the time. And 80% seems fair given he was leading in the polls by a razor thin but consistent margin.

jeffbee 1 hour ago | parent

Polymarket isn't binary so you are understating how wrong they were. Polymaket gives outcomes as percentage odds and less than 12 hours ago they had Bolsonaro by 5-to-1.

cowlevel 42 minutes ago | parent

They resolve as binary. Until they resolve it's a percentage chance of the eventual resolution.

axus 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe it's useful for people spending money to present the odds they wish for?

furyofantares 1 hour ago | parent

20% happens about 1 in 5 times. I know that's snarky wording but 20% shots come though constantly in daily life.

I think as humans we are really bad at intuition about probabilities, and it being an election only makes it much worse. I don't think anyone is consciously conflating these with poll numbers but percentages of voters are the numbers we see a lot more than prediction markets, and 80% is idunno an 80% chance of getting between 50% and 54% of the vote or something.

alpha_squared 1 hour ago | parent

It's not a 'prediction market', it's a gambling market. It's far more accurate to say 80% of gamblers were convinced Bolsanaro would win than to say there's an 80% likelihood he would win. It's not measuring likelihood as it's untethered from things that impact the actual results. Obscuring it basic gambling with the word 'prediction' doesn't change the fact that's naked gambling at the end of the day.

quirino 53 minutes ago | parent

The 80% is not the proportion of people who think he would win, that's not how these things work.

Every single factor was pointing towards Bolsonaro, Polymarket was just consistent with that.

He unexpectedly won the first round of the election. His lead was expected to grow since he'd likely get most of the votes of the other candidates. 17 out of 18 polls favored Bolsonaro. Market movements indicated a strong expectation of him winning. The Brazilian Real futures are already down 10% in the last couple hours.

matheusmoreira 9 minutes ago | parent

> The Brazilian Real futures are already down 10% in the last couple hours.

Brutal.

augusto-moura 1 hour ago | parent

They were never useful for the results, just for market expectation, which is never the same as real chances of something happening

medellin 1 hour ago | parent

Not really. If you follow anyone who has been covering latam for a long time they had odds of this election at a coinflip.

bryanlarsen 1 hour ago | parent

A 20% chance of Lula winning is still a real chance of winning. A standard rule of thumb would require 2 standard deviations aka 5% aka p<0.05 for relative certainty.

estebank 1 hour ago | parent

If you think this result with those odds is unexpected, you must have never played X-Com :)

platevoltage 1 hour ago | parent

We saw how they took it last time.

matheusmoreira 56 minutes ago | parent

If the new right wing senate manages to at least impeach some supreme court judges, I'll still call it a major win.

Surprising to see Bolsonaro lose at this point, but the real upset of this election was caused by the senate. The whole point of electing the right wing was to impeach the judges. So long as that happens, I will be satisfied.

The next four years were going to seriously suck for Flávio. Now the economic bomb is going to explode in Lula's hands. I was tempted to vote for Lula myself just to make that happen. It's the supreme court issue that stopped me.

Lula's barely fit for his position as president too. He might resign and let the vice-president deal with it. Also an acceptable outcome.

cowlevel 41 minutes ago | parent

What do you get out of posting on HN that you want to destroy your country?

matheusmoreira 12 minutes ago | parent

It's the only place where I feel safe enough to discuss Brazilian politics.

Impeachment of the supreme court is precisely what will save this country. They have been ruling monocratically since they launched the "fake news" inquisition in 2019. People can stomach a Lula win, even I have points where I intersect with the guy. The thing is not a single Brazilian voted for those judges.

subdude 1 hour ago | parent

Heartening after all the interference the US and its oligarchs threw at this election.

nemomarx 1 hour ago | parent

This is probably a good support case for run-off elections being beneficial.

wraptile 1 hour ago | parent

Ranked voting and runoff systems seem to have nothing but positives yet adoption is still lacking for some reason.

lotsofpulp 1 hour ago | parent

First past the post is beneficial for establishment parties.

xvedejas 1 hour ago | parent

Depends on which ranked system. IRV has a lot of issues that other systems (like STAR, my personal preference in voting system, or Condorcet methods for instance) address much better. Non-monotonicity in particular seems like a bad property of a voting system, so I'm confused that IRV is so popular recently.

Tiktaalik 55 minutes ago | parent

No electoral method is perfect and there are problems with Instant runoff ranked ballots. Look up "Favourite Betrayal" as a problem where ranking your most favourite incorrectly can accidentally result in your least favourite winning.

Of course just because there are technically flaws, doesn't mean it's not an improvement over the status quo.

Instant Runoff Ranked ballots are particularly well suited for electing a single position like a Mayor or President. Given that it's still a majoritarian system like First Pass the Post, it's a much more questionable system to use for other things like electing a parliament.

cowlevel 46 minutes ago | parent

I think IRV at least has fairly unpredictable failure cases, which means they can't be exploited.

I remember seeing a 2D chart representing voter preferences on the X and Y axis, coloured by who wins under those preferences (and some assumptions). Some systems showed clear biases towards certain outcomes. IRV had a pretty symmetric shape but with a random mess of different colours in the middle.

thimabi 1 hour ago | parent

Once again, a clear anti-Bolsonaro vote from the majority of the electorate. Lula won because he got last-minute support from the moderates and even some right-wingers. It certainly does not feel like a victory of the left.

Now he will face a much bigger opposition in Congress and therefore will have to find a middle ground.

I expect his policies to move even further to the right. This might pave the way for his vice-president Alckmin, a historical right-winger, to run in the 2030 elections — likely against São Paulo’s governor Tarcísio de Freitas, also a right-winger and considered more moderate than the Bolsonaros despite being associated with them.

(reposting my own comment from a related thread)

nemomarx 1 hour ago | parent

The margin is a little close, so is the Senate expected to be deadlocked? Or is there a coalition that can form between moderates and the left?

thimabi 1 hour ago | parent

I wouldn’t say deadlocked but the coalition between moderates and the left isn’t a given. There are many centrist parties who will likely alternate between supporting and opposing the government depending on the issue.

ufo 57 minutes ago | parent

Senate is very right wing.

runarberg 1 hour ago | parent

I would call this a defensive victory. The left’s best chance was a 0-0 draw, so they put everyone in defense and managed to prevent the right from scoring a victory goal.

nielsbot 1 hour ago | parent

moving to the right would be a trap. (cf. Dem party vs Trump) The left must instead build an anti-right wing narrative. People vote on material benefits so delivering more of those should be top priority—I think Trumps slump in the US proves that.

supjeff 1 hour ago | parent

The one good thing about the current system is that shitheads like musk can spend half-a-billion to buy elections, but the people still have the final say.

colordrops 1 hour ago | parent

That's assuming no gerrymandering and funny business at the polls.

p-e-w 1 hour ago | parent

Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results. Most electoral systems already give unequal weight to different votes based on district sizes etc., so gerrymandering is only a change of degree and intention, not of how democracy fundamentally works.

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

> Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results.

Well it does change which voters decide the results. A lot of electoral systems seek to constantly redress imbalance by having impartial bodies redraw district lines as populations shift. It is a shame the US does not. Gerrymandering is fundamentally undemocratic.

cowlevel 52 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure you could find, or make, an impartial body in the US.

andersonpico 1 hour ago | parent

gerrymandering is not possible with Brasil electoral system

dietr1ch 45 minutes ago | parent

Right, but he's right to try to account for legal, as in currently allowed, cheating or misrepresentation of the people in a democracy.

xoa 1 hour ago | parent

>gerrymandering

I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risk. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.

>funny business

This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.

brunoborges 59 minutes ago | parent

Brazilian here. President wins by popular vote. Period.

Must win by 50% plus 1 of all valid votes on Round 1. If not, 1st and 2nd most voted go for Round 2 a few weeks later. Then, 50%+1 again of all valid votes.

Dwedit 55 minutes ago | parent

While gerrymandering technically "only" involves the house, it can demotivate people who would otherwise turn out.

saturn8601 35 minutes ago | parent

Gerrymandering is the most benign of the tricks, and both sides play that trick. What's more concerning is we don't really have a true paper record of the votes. So many of these swing states have machines that produce digital only voting records. So how do we even know that the vote is accurate? Even if there was a paper record, most states don't even bother re-checking unless it's very close. After 2016, a lot of activism across the country has forced states to switch to a paper + digital record, which allows quick tallies, but then also paper backup and opens the door to two way verification. Unfortunately, this is not enough. There needs to be validation done after the election to confirm. But again, the worst part is that the states that really matter have been the ones least incentivized to actually switch over. So who knows? While its conspiracy thinking that Trump didn't actually win in 2024, do we really know for sure?

Everything else you mentioned also matters. I can't tell you the amount of times that the state of Georgia, suddenly out of the blue, invalidated a lot of registered voters. And if people don't check, like my friend in a minority town outside of Atlanta, they won't realize until election day. Red states are more likely to play this trick. Your conclusion is something I disagree with, though. Voters have lost so much over the last decade, and they don't fight back until it really starts to affect them personally. I think the surge that we might see this election is only due to economics. If the economics were good, it's not out of the question that Trump would be doing fairly decent this election cycle. This is why Iran is playing things very well to try to enact maximum economic pain in the days before the election. But it's all about economics, and that shows you that people truly don't really care.

dvdyzag 1 hour ago | parent

wasn't musk heavily quoted in physics and tech books until his politics became center stage?

ryan_n 1 hour ago | parent

Serious question: why would he be "heavily" quoted in physics books? I didn't think he was a physicist, is he?

jeffbee 1 hour ago | parent

We need to get to the bottom of why people believe stuff like that, and fix it.

hackyhacky 1 hour ago | parent

You're fighting a losing war against human laziness and gullibility.

lazide 1 hour ago | parent

Reality distortion field. Same reason Jobs is held up as an amazing visionary.

p-e-w 1 hour ago | parent

That assumption has certainly been vindicated, considering what happened to Apple after he was gone.

datsci_est_2015 1 hour ago | parent

A 5 trillion dollar company?

cowlevel 50 minutes ago | parent

That produces the blandest corporate safe slop.

beloch 51 minutes ago | parent

It's money.

If you have a lot of money and you've managed to stay out of prison, people are generally ready to believe good things about you and want to be in your good graces. If you pay people to continually say good things about you and manage your media appearances for you, there will generally be a lot of impact to that. You're just telling people what they're primed to believe. A lot of people will fluff up your image for free just because they're hoping for patronage.

Musk has a BA in physics that was awarded a couple years after he says he says he completed his studies. Unlike CPSC, leaving a physics program early robs you of some pretty crucial stuff. You generally don't see a lot of rockstar physicists leaving university early to join startups. Despite Musk posing as a rocket scientist, engineering guru, etc., there's no evidence he's one of the scientific or engineering minds behind Tesla or SpaceX's work. He's just a money guy.

The general rule for money guys is that the closer you are to the money, the more of it you can get. This is why CEO's are paid outrageous sums. Musk is the closest guy to the money at his companies, and his one true gift seems to be "getting close" to politicians in order to get the public's money, which Tesla and SpaceX have received gob-smacking amounts of.

If you want a laugh, go look up the episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History addendum where he brought Musk on. Carlin typically interviews authors of history books, so why Musk? Why indeed! During this episode, it comes out that Musk used to have models of WWII planes but clearly knows absolutely nothing about history. Despite this, he makes every effort to sound like he does. This is the sort of exposure $$$ gets you but, sometimes, you miss the mark.

georgemcbay 1 hour ago | parent

Somewhat Related:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA

epihelix 1 hour ago | parent

It's not limited to textbooks or academic publications, or based on any context whatsoever, but an ngram search actually suggests there's a much larger musk stain on recent published literature than I'd ever thought possible:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Elon+Musk%2CAl...

Make of that what you will.

cowlevel 50 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand how to filter this to physics books

so-gala-massey 1 hour ago | parent

I guess some people still like to troll? Or are so dumb they’ve obviously never even cracked a physic text? I’m hoping it’s just old fashioned trolling.

coeneedell 1 hour ago | parent

Not really. He had a really good PR person that made people think this, but most technologists are focused on, y’know, actual technology

ceejayoz 1 hour ago | parent

You’re making the claim. Back it up.

Thrymr 1 hour ago | parent

sergiotapia 1 hour ago | parent

https://x.com/AlexanderSoros/status/2114508265643983067

Need I say more?

platevoltage 1 hour ago | parent

Wait, what did he do besides be happy that a fascist isn't in charge of the future of the Amazon?

cowlevel 49 minutes ago | parent

Yes, please say more, I have no idea what you're saying.

MattDamonSpace 1 hour ago | parent

So can we stop panicking about money in elections or

mahmoudhossam 1 hour ago | parent

No.

Ygg2 1 hour ago | parent

Not really. A biased coin doesn't need to be biased 99% (to 1%) for it to matter.

Telaneo 1 hour ago | parent

Absolutely the fuck not.

georgemcbay 1 hour ago | parent

No, this much money in politics is still very dangerous.

A major reason it isn't working for now is because Donald Trump is, in addition to being a corrupt autocrat, incredibly incompetent. We shouldn't have to rely on that next time.

dylan604 30 minutes ago | parent

Trump's time is ending, but Musk's is not. That's pretty scary

johnnyanmac 57 minutes ago | parent

Nope. Money still buys votes. It's just that Musk is so opaquely unpopular outside of the US that it negates his riches. Which really says something.

tialaramex 3 minutes ago | parent

Interestingly the current "lets stop corporations from spending money on elections" that's popular in several states - wouldn't directly touch Musk because he can just spend the money directly.

I don't think "Oooh. Scary muslims!" works any less well if it's required to say "Elon Musk" rather than "American Apple Pie Goodness PAC" or whatever.

It might make a difference for smaller donors, especially if they're more sensitive about their personal PR.

hinow 1 hour ago | parent

Parabéns Lula! Uffaaaaaa

bguberfain 1 hour ago | parent

This was the first time I saw a major mainstream media outlet prominently feature a statistical predictive model live during the vote count (and it was spot on): https://www.estadao.com.br/politica/eleicoes/em-tempo-real-p...

zorked 1 hour ago | parent

Indeed, Rodrigo Mahlmeister's model was absolutey impressive. It even predicted the inflection points incredibly well.

soneca 1 hour ago | parent

I have a learning a bit more related to tech from this election. Centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement wins elections.

It won for Bolsonaro whose campaign nailed it in 2018. It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics (mocking people dying and saying he had nothing to do with it being president).

Now, Lula’s campaign was absolutely dead during the whole time. Until it lost in the legislative by a mile and in the President run had a partial loss in the first round. Then the campaign lit up after the partial upset.

Janones, an energetic young guy elected to legislative with good online presence led the campaign. He achieved creating a WhatsApp group with 11 million people called “Lula’s army”. He would give the directions and the people would obey almost blindly.

The interwebs (basically WhatsApp + Instagram) got flooded with this top to bottom Lula’s campaign.

The first round results made Bolsonaro very favorite. Lula victory was a huge upset. I put the merit in this incessant social media campaign.

The thing is: “centrally planned cohesive campaign” looks a lot like a cult. The point of the campaign is not critical thought or argumentation, it is incessant messaging. Think fandoms.

Bolsonaro voters pejorative nickname from past campaigns was they were all “cattle”. Because that is how they behaved online. Ironically, what worked for Lula voters this year was they behaving like “cattle”. Just reposting and following this central orders on what to post, what to say, what to dress.

The thing is, it works. Cult-like fandoms work in elections. The right won a few elections like this in the world. In Brazil, the left just learned how to do it was well.

The more mindless posters a politician has following their campaign HQ orders, the more votes they have.

brazukadev 1 hour ago | parent

Absolutely. Janones won this election. Let's see if he will be part of the government or will be sidelined again.

matheusmoreira 48 minutes ago | parent

> It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics

And also because the entire state apparatus was engaged in unconstitutional censorship of his "centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement" machine, which is what wins elections, as you noted.

And now that Janones set up his own "Lula's Army", Brazilian institutions did not manifest even a fraction of the energy they had shown while persecuting Bolsonaro.

Lula was allowed to do everything Bolsonaro was persecuted for in 2022. He even lowered taxes on fuels, and got away with it. The tax cut ends tomorrow.

swingandamiss 1 hour ago | parent

I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc. This is exactly why I stopped going to reddit.

aliasxneo 1 hour ago | parent

Just a friendly gesture that there's still independents/non-partisan's here. We're a dying breed, but it seems to the the inevitable outcome when politics becomes a religion.

torlok 53 minutes ago | parent

Buddy, ICE is chasing down and killing US citizens. Musk is openly supporting European neo-Nazis. The US tech sector is supporting the genocide of Palestinians, and interfering with foreign elections.

aliasxneo 48 minutes ago | parent

See, the problem is that each side has moved so far to the extreme that any middle of the road comment is perceived as supporting the other side. But thanks for the demonstration, I guess.

torlok 42 minutes ago | parent

Swing and a miss buddy. The point is that big tech is political by its own choice, and you have to be extremely ignorant to look past that.

aliasxneo 33 minutes ago | parent

No, you just blatantly assumed none of those things mattered to me. You do realize you can have morals and opinions but also be non-partisan, right? Of course big tech is political, I completely agree. But you never asked me that question. Which again, really just keeps driving my point home. It's rabid.

cowlevel 39 minutes ago | parent

A middle of the road comment would be "we need taxes, but not too high" or "children shouldn't be going hungry, but very sadly we can't afford to feed them from the city budget". What's actually being responded to above is the complete lack of a comment.

cowlevel 40 minutes ago | parent

The left: we need free healthcare and less market capture.

The right: we need to torture immigrants and more market capture.

The center: I can't decide between these two equally appealing, equally moral options.

i_love_retros 44 minutes ago | parent

In current times only cowards and deadbeats are non partisan.

aliasxneo 36 minutes ago | parent

Non-partisan doesn't mean lack of engagement or action. Maybe that's why there's so much confusion here.

roshannarma 54 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it's a really bad echo chamber, hard to find any system that is not built around group thinking

newsy-combi 48 minutes ago | parent

True.

i_love_retros 45 minutes ago | parent

So you're not against fascism?

georgemcbay 1 minute ago | parent

A shocking number of people aren't against fascism, as long as you don't use the actual word to describe what they support.

And when you correctly use the word to describe what they are supporting, you are inciting violence.

fn-mote 1 hour ago | parent

As optimistic as I want to be, this is the fourth term for a president?? That cannot be good for democracy.

It can be better than the alternatives and still not good.

surgical_fire 47 minutes ago | parent

Not in a row.

Lula served two terms from 2002-2010, and came back in 2022 (now to serve until 2030, if he lives until then).

mixologic 46 minutes ago | parent

His first two terms were 2003-2011

cowlevel 44 minutes ago | parent

It's very situationally dependent. Term limits stop bad politicians doing too much damage, they also stop good politicians getting too much momentum on their side.

bombcar 35 minutes ago | parent

Term limits result in dynasties "behind the scenes" running things.

Long-term politicians result in "behind the scenes" doing the real work of running things.

Wait a minute ...

motionlessveloc 40 minutes ago | parent

Plus he's 80 today and will be 84 by the time his term ends. Gerontocracy for the win.

digitalPhonix 9 minutes ago | parent

Why? If they’re democratically voted, what’s wrong with it?

Australia has no term limits and has famously had the longest serving prime minister (12 years) followed by extremely short terms. All seemed to represent the general will of the population.

i_love_retros 49 minutes ago | parent

Hey Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, Vance, Rubio:

BRASIL SAYS FUCK YOU!