Survey: 379 Incidents and 18 Deaths Targeted Voters in Brazil’s Runoff

Political violence in Brazil’s runoff and immediate aftermath shifted sharply away from candidates and toward ordinary voters, activists and workers, with 379 incidents and 18 deaths recorded in just 27 days, according to a survey released Wednesday by the human-rights groups Terra de Direitos and Justiça Global.

The tally covers Oct. 5 through Oct. 31, spanning the runoff campaign and the week after the election. The groups said their figures come from media monitoring cross-checked with official records and public complaints. It is not an official national crime database, but the fourth edition of a monitoring project the NGOs have maintained since 2016.

Of the 379 episodes, 350, or 92.3%, affected voters, party militants, campaign workers and party committees, the groups said. Only 29 targeted candidacies, officeholders or party offices. The incidents were logged in 198 municipalities across all 27 of Brazil’s federative units, along with cases reported abroad. The survey also counted 18 killings linked to the electoral dispute in the period and 18 additional attacks with lethal intent, 12 involving firearms.

The pattern marked a break from the first round, the NGOs said. Violence against candidates averaged 2.68 episodes per day in the first round, compared with 1.07 per day in the second-round period. Attacks on voters and militants, by contrast, rose to nearly 13 a day. Smaller municipalities were hit hardest by the most severe cases: towns with up to 50,000 residents accounted for 61% of attacks with lethal intent and 12 of the 18 deaths. In those towns, 31% of violent episodes involved shootings, vehicle attacks or killings, compared with 4% in cities with more than 100,000 residents.

The most intense burst came after the result. Between the announcement of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory on the evening of Oct. 25 and the early hours of Oct. 26, the NGOs recorded 54 episodes in 43 municipalities across 16 states. Their breakdown for that night listed 32 physical assaults, eight threats, 11 attacks with lethal intent, two insults and one case of criminalization. In 13 of those incidents, the groups said, the alleged perpetrators were state agents, including military police officers, municipal guards and a prison officer.

The report argues that intimidation also spread into workplaces and local commerce after the vote. Across the second-round period, the NGOs recorded 84 cases involving firings, threats of firing, calls for boycotts or boycott lists. From Oct. 26 to Oct. 31 alone, they counted 101 episodes, including 78 involving firings, threats of firing, incitement to boycott or boycott lists. Their breakdown for those retaliation cases included 14 firings or threats of firing, 27 public calls to fire or boycott, and 43 boycott lists.

Official labor data point in the same direction. Brazil’s Ministério Público do Trabalho, the labor prosecutor’s office, said it had received 3,754 complaints of electoral workplace harassment by Oct. 29, above the 3,373 recorded during the entire 2022 election cycle. Of those 2026 complaints, 1,459 arrived in the 3 1/2 days after the vote.

The groups said the violence fell overwhelmingly on Lula’s supporters. Of 242 “diffuse” incidents they were able to classify politically during the second-round period, 225, or 93%, affected supporters of Lula or his Workers’ Party, known as the PT, according to the NGOs’ coding.

The new figures also underscore how concentrated the late-October wave was. In earlier 2026 releases, the same monitoring project recorded 134 incidents during the first round, from Aug. 16 to Oct. 4, and 354 incidents in the broader pre-electoral period from Oct. 28, 2024, to Aug. 15, 2026.

As one example, the NGOs cited Mangueirinha, in Paraná state, where a drunk driver broke through a police blockade and hit people celebrating Lula’s victory; activist Eliseu Pedrozo dos Santos, 38, later died. Regional media reported that the driver was arrested.

“A democracia exige segurança tanto para quem disputa o voto quanto para quem vai às urnas,” Gisele Barbieri of Terra de Direitos said in the release.