Brazil holds presidential, legislative and regional elections

Brazil's polling stations opened on Sunday for the presidential, legislative and regional elections, in which former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appears to be the favourite in all polls over the current president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Some 156.4 million voters have been called to elect the president, 27 governors, 513 deputies, one-third of the Senate and renew representatives in regional legislative assemblies, and the election day began at 08:00 local time (11:00 GMT) and will close at 17:00 (20:00 GMT).

Once the polling stations throughout the country close, which for the first time will take place at a unified time, the Superior Electoral Court will begin to disseminate the first bulletins with official results.

The count is expected to be completed in a few hours, thanks to the electronic voting system that has been used in Brazil since 1996 and whose reliability has been questioned by Bolsonaro, despite the fact that there has never been any suspicion of fraud.

According to the latest polls, released on Saturday, Lula has a clear lead of fourteen percentage points over Bolsonaro, and would receive between 50 and 51% of the valid votes projected by the two most reputable pollsters in the country.

In the event that neither candidate receives more than half of the valid votes, the two candidates with the most votes will face off in a run-off scheduled for 30 October.

Voters will be able to exercise their right to vote in the 5,570 municipalities throughout the country, the Federal District of Brasilia and the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, in addition to 181 locations abroad.

The nearly half a million electronic ballot boxes installed in the country will once again have an extensive security system, reinforced with army troops, which will be present in 568 municipalities, mainly in the Amazon region and in some cities with high levels of violence, such as Rio de Janeiro.

This year's elections, the most polarised since Brazil's return to democracy in 1985, have been characterised by a climate of tension between Lula and Bolsonaro, a dispute that has spread to his supporters, with some cases of attacks and deaths motivated by political arguments.