Brazil goes to the polls on 4 October with an electoral roll of 158,745,463 people, and 297,977 of them are recorded as being 100 years old or more. Brazil’s 2022 census, taken four years ago by IBGE, counted 37,814 residents of that age in the entire country. The roll therefore carries 7.9 registrations aged 100-plus for every centenarian the census found, an excess of 260,163.
That national comparison was made in Brazil last week and is not new. What has not been published is where the excess sits, and the answer is that it is almost entirely a story about four states and about one procedure.
Rio de Janeiro state lists 105,262 voters aged 100 or over — more than a third of the national total, in a state whose census centenarian population is 2,712. São Paulo lists 79,874, Minas Gerais 52,424 and Rio Grande do Sul 21,022. Together those four hold 258,582 of the 297,977, or 86.8%. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, 68,142 of 4,950,429 registered voters are recorded as at least 100 years old: one in every 73 people on the municipal roll.
The mechanism separating those states from the rest is visible in the same file, because TSE also publishes whether each registration has been biometrically enrolled. Across the whole electorate, 89.0% of voters have been fingerprinted. In the 100-plus band the figure is 7.99%. In Rio de Janeiro state it is 0.55% — 580 people out of 105,262.
Biometric coverage falls smoothly with age up to a point and then falls off a cliff: 92.4% of voters aged 65 to 69 have been enrolled, 85.4% of those aged 75 to 79, 65.8% of those aged 85 to 89, 27.8% of those aged 95 to 99, and 8.0% of the 100-plus band. Enrolment happens when a voter appears in person at an electoral office during a revision. A registration that has never been through one is a record nobody has looked at in years.
The clearest evidence that this is administrative rather than demographic is what happens when a state does look. Between the 2022 and 2024 rolls, Bahia’s count of registered centenarians fell from 12,839 to 1,832, an 85.7% drop. Ceará fell from 6,453 to 1,249, Pará from 7,678 to 1,722, Maranhão from 7,253 to 1,784, Amazonas from 2,775 to 545. Over the same two years Rio de Janeiro went the other way, from 39,850 to 78,189. Bahia now lists 2,565 voters aged 100 or over against a census centenarian population of 5,336 — fewer registrations than people.
The eighteen states where 85% or more of the 100-plus band has been fingerprinted hold 19,008 such registrations between them. The nine where the figure is under 25% hold 278,969.
What the public data cannot show is why any individual record is there. Brazilian registrations are cancelled when a death certificate reaches the electoral authority, and a death that never generates that notification leaves the entry in place. Wrong birth dates in old paper records would produce the same signature. No TSE open dataset carries a date of birth, so the check that would separate the two — the distribution of birth years inside the band — cannot be run from outside the tribunal.
Two things follow from that, and both cut against the alarming reading. Voting is optional in Brazil for anyone over 70, under article 14 of the constitution, so these registrations carry no obligation and generate no absence to explain. And the biometric gap that identifies them is also what constrains them: in the states that have completed biometric revision, a voter without an enrolled fingerprint cannot simply be handed a ballot.
The trend is the part that will not resolve itself. The 100-plus band has grown from 10,635 registrations in 2010 to 184,113 in 2022 and 297,977 now, a rise of 61.7% in four years, while the bands just below it have shrunk — the 95-to-99 band is down 27.7% since 2022 and the 90-to-94 band down 10.0%. A register in which the oldest band grows while the bands feeding it fall is not tracking a population.