WASHINGTON: Can someone mistake Brazil for India, two countries that exist almost diametrically opposite to each other -- India's precise antipode sits closer to Brazil's fellow South American giant Chile -- on the globe? Apparently, US President Donald Trump can.
In a glaring factual error, the President in a social media post on Sunday referred to Brazil’s presidential election as India's to claim that the electoral process in the US was “corrupt”.
“125 Million People voted today in the first round of India's Presidential Election. The results came out shortly after the vote closed, on the SAME DAY,” Trump said in a Truth Social post, riddled with his characteristic grammatical errors, before turning to his familiar criticism of the US electoral system.
“Voting in America is CORRUPT,” Trump said, referring to the weeks taken for the counting of votes in elections in US cities and states.
Brazil, alphabetically the first part of the acronym BRICS, attended a summit of the grouping in New Delhi last month and the two nations met each other in a FIFA international friendly football match in Kolkata on Saturday -- though neither fact could reliably be cited to explain the mix-up by the US President who handed over the sport's biggest prize in New Jersey in July.
The FIFA football World Cup was co-hosted by the US, where the sport is more commonly known as soccer, and the winners' trophy was lifted by Spain's captain Rodri, who popularly goes by one name instead of the full Rodrigo Hernández Cascante.
India's citizens do not directly vote for their President, who is elected by an electoral college formed by members of Parliament and state assemblies. The incumbent Droupadi Murmu assumed office in 2022.
For a US President seeking to make a point about the speed and credibility of elections, the irony was hard to miss. And the confusion was not just geographical; it was electoral too.
Trump's post referred to "125 million" people voting in "India's Presidential elections" and marvelled at how quickly the results came out "after the vote closed" -- a description that, in the details presented, fitted Sunday's presidential election in Brazil nearly perfectly.
Brazil, not India, went to the polls on Sunday for the first round of its presidential election. The South American country recorded 125.27 million valid votes, according to its electoral authority, while results started coming in from 5 pm, when voting closed, and were updated as ballots were counted.
“In Detroit, Philadelphia, California, and numerous other US Cities and States, the results, with much smaller numbers, will often take weeks to Rig, I mean, calculate," Trump said.
Brazil's election on Sunday featured incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. With neither candidate securing a majority, the two will face each other in a run-off on October 25.
India had nearly 980 million registered electors in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. So, while India's electoral system did not produce the numbers Trump cited, the country's elections have featured prominently in his arguments about how voting should be conducted in the United States.
In August, Trump invoked India's voter identification system to push for electoral reforms in the US.
Trump on August 17 said India's Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had spoken with officials from his administration and asked how US elections could be held without a valid photo identification card.
The US president made these remarks to drum up support for the SAVE America Act, which would require Americans to show proof of citizenship to register to vote, impose a nationwide voter identification requirement and severely limit voting by mail.
"India's last Election had 646,000,000 Voters! Less than one per cent voted by mail, and every single Voter had to have a VALID Photo Identity Document... We need to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, now," he had then asserted in a social media post.