Brazil votes today in a presidential runoff that the final polls could not separate

Brazil chooses a president today, and nobody can say which way it goes. The runoff pits President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is seeking a fourth term, against Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. More than 158.7 million Brazilians are eligible to vote. Polls close at 5 p.m. Brasilia time, and Brazil's electronic count usually produces a result within hours.

Bolsonaro won the first round on October 4 with 47.03 percent of the valid vote, about 56.1 million ballots, against 45.16 percent and 53.9 million for Lula. Neither man reached the majority the law requires, so the race went to a second round. The result surprised pollsters, who had expected Lula to finish first.

The final polls stayed inside their own margins of error. CNT/MDA, which surveyed 2,032 people from October 21 to 23, put Bolsonaro at 46.3 percent and Lula at 45 percent, with a margin of error of 2.2 points, as of October 24. Datafolha's last count of valid votes put Bolsonaro at 51 percent and Lula at 49 percent, also a statistical tie. Voters who backed the smaller first round candidates hold the balance, and two of them, Augusto Cury and Renan Santos, who took a combined 6.1 million votes, refused to endorse either man. Ronaldo Caiado, who finished fifth, backed Bolsonaro.

Flavio Bolsonaro has pledged to seek legal pardons for his father and for others convicted over the January 2023 storming of government buildings in Brasilia, which followed his father's defeat in the last election. His Liberal Party became the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies in the first round and nearly doubled its seats in the Senate. Lula campaigned on keeping the Bolsonaro family out of power and predicted that the Trump administration would try to tilt the race.