Today, January 4, the executive director of Transparência Brasil, Juliana Sakai, is taking part in a public hearing at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) in defense of changes to the 2026 electoral drafts to prevent setbacks for the candidacies of women, blacks and indigenous people. The hearings to debate the rules for this year’s elections began yesterday, January 3, and run until tomorrow, January 5.

According to the organization, there are loopholes in the accountability rules proposed by the TSE that could inflate campaign spending for these groups. The main one is the possibility for parties to include legal and accounting services in the sum of campaign spending by women, blacks and indigenous people, unlike other candidates.

The approval of the text in the form presented by the Court would render the electoral quotas ineffective, contrary to the spirit of the electoral legislation that instituted affirmative action with the aim of promoting gender and racial representation in politics, says TB.

In order to guarantee social control over candidacies, the organization proposed changes to the rules on registration and accountability, such as simplifying the current format for declaring assets and immediately publishing campaign spending receipts online.

In addition to these points, the TB director will defend at the hearing the approval of the provision that removes the CPF of candidates from the list of documents considered confidential and not disclosed. The change was included after the organization and eight other entities asked the TSE to resume disclosure of the data, which is essential for differentiating homonyms and cross-referencing candidate information with other databases.

Limits on civil society contributions

For Transparência Brasil, the current format for changes to electoral rules limits civil society contributions, as it is only possible to suggest changes to provisions already covered by the TSE in the drafts presented for each election.

In other words, problems or the absence of historical regulations have no room to be debated and changed, since they depend on the Court’s proposal. An example of this is the lack of a limit on spending on legal and accounting services for campaigns, an item not modified by the TSE in this year’s rules, but highlighted for amendment by TB as a way of curbing the risk of money laundering.