Eliana Sousa Silva, founding director of Redes da Maré
With 125,000 residents and 60,292 registered voters, Maré has significant electoral strength. Understanding how residents vote requires going beyond the ballot box: who is able to vote, and how are these votes translated into rights, investment, and representation?
The right to vote begins before the election. In Maré, 62% of the population is Black or Brown, 51% are women, and women are the primary providers in 44% of households. Income, mobility, and caregiving responsibilities shape political participation. The idea that favela residents do not know how to vote or are easily manipulated is prejudiced. It disregards their capacity to make choices and conceals structures that turn inequalities into electoral advantages. When services depend on political intermediaries, rights are presented as favors. Addressing this requires universal, continuous, and transparent policies, as well as institutions that fulfill their responsibilities.
The project “How Does Maré Vote?”, by Redes da Maré, investigates these dynamics in relation to rights that are neglected for impoverished populations and their connection to residents’ electoral choices. The 2022 state election provides an example: candidate Marcelo Freixo received greater support in areas affected by police operations, such as Nova Holanda and Parque Maré. Candidate Claudio Castro, meanwhile, obtained his largest margins in Praia de Ramos and Roquete Pinto, where there are no records of police operations during the period under consideration. There is no automatic relationship between violence and voting, but different experiences with the state help explain political choices.
Two electoral districts cover the polling sections in Maré: the 161st and 162nd districts. The 161st is the more representative, as approximately 60% of its polling sections are located within Maré or in its immediate surroundings. In the 162nd, by contrast, only 7% of the polling sections are located in this way. Taking these two districts as an example, the results of last Sunday’s presidential and gubernatorial elections reveal a particularity in relation to the citywide average, in one case through their similarity and in the other through their difference.
In the 162nd electoral district, where the participation of Maré voters is small, the results closely resemble those of the city of Rio de Janeiro, with Flávio Bolsonaro leading the presidential race and Eduardo Paes leading the gubernatorial race, with percentages differing by less than one percentage point from the figures each achieved in the citywide results.
However, in the 161st electoral district, where more than half of the polling sections serve Maré residents, Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro by a margin of 14 percentage points, nearly 10 points higher than his result in the city as a whole. In the gubernatorial race, Eduardo Paes received 8 percentage points more than his citywide average.
However, voter participation faced an obstacle in 2026: the relocation of polling places on the grounds that the Maré favelas constitute a high-risk area. TRE-RJ announced more than 70 relocations, affecting approximately 200,000 voters in 20 municipalities. In Maré, changes to polling locations affected 31,650 people, more than half of the electorate.
There is a lack of transparency regarding the criteria used to justify the removal of some polling sections while maintaining others in the same area. Over ten years of monitoring, the “Eyes on Maré” project has not recorded armed confrontations on election days. The tragic memory goes back to 2006, when Renan, a three-year-old boy, was killed by police officers who had been deployed to reinforce election security. The relocated polling places operate in municipal schools. If these buildings receive children every day, why would they be unsuitable for adults to vote there for a few hours? Without transparent criteria, the decision reinforces the stigma of the favela as a dangerous territory and disregards its community organization.
How will voters reach the new polling sections? A few kilometers can make a significant difference where there is no public transportation within the community, especially in the absence of clear information. Thus, the right to vote cannot be guaranteed in theory while being made impossible for residents to exercise in practice.
At stake are different visions of the state, security, the city, and rights. Maré’s electoral strength needs to be transformed into concrete influence. The quality of democracy is also measured by the ability of popular territories to participate in decisions about their present and future.
Article published in the newspaper O Globo
Rio de Janeiro, October 6, 2026
