On September 28, 2026, Supreme Court (STF) Justice Cristiano Zanin partly granted a request from the Green Party (PV) and the CNTE teachers' confederation. Mobile users who have exhausted their data plans must keep free access to Electoral Justice websites and the e-Título app from 72 hours before to 24 hours after each round of Brazil's October 4 elections, according to Agência Brasil, as republished by Diario de Pernambuco. He rejected the broader demand that data caps be lifted altogether.
What the order actually does
The decision is a preliminary injunction in ADPF 1355, per the STF's own news service. It directs Anatel to guarantee that traffic to official Electoral Justice domains ending in jus.br, including the TSE's fact-checking site, the regional electoral courts' portals and the TSE's apps, does not consume or require data allowance. Canaltech reports the windows as October 1 to 5 for the first round and October 22 to 26 if a runoff is held on October 25. Social media, streaming and news sites stay blocked for users with no remaining data.
The process was fast. On September 24, Zanin gave Anatel 48 hours to respond, and asked for input from the Attorney General's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office. He flagged that the requested measures could reach companies that are not parties to the case, according to SBT News. Four days later he ruled for a narrower remedy than the petitioners sought.
The strongest case for going further
The petitioners' argument deserves a fair hearing. Access to information on voting day is not a luxury. Brazil's internet is overwhelmingly mobile: the CGI.br survey TIC Domicílios 2025 finds that 65% of internet users go online exclusively by phone, rising to 87% in classes D and E. For these voters, a depleted data plan can cut them off from polling-place lookup, ID checks and fact-checking in the final days of a campaign. Zanin's own reasoning, as reported by Diario de Pernambuco, was that the impossibility of consulting official sources and using electoral services on voting days cannot be remedied after the election. A blanket suspension of data caps would reach further, and advocates can reasonably say that a person without data is effectively disenfranchised from the online public square for a week.
Why the narrower remedy is better
Blanket uncapping, however, fails on proportionality. Data caps are a pricing and network-management instrument. Forcing every carrier to provide unlimited traffic for roughly five days, to everyone, would impose capacity costs on firms that were not parties to the case, with no record of how much congestion it would create on election day. Zanin's choice shows a sensible instinct: identify the specific public-interest traffic, exempt it, and leave the rest of the market alone.
That approach also fits the evidence. The STF notes that a similar arrangement operated in the 2020 elections through a "Zero Rating for Elections 2020" agreement between the TSE and the telecom sector, which reportedly produced more than 13 million page views from the traffic exemption. In other words, the measure is workable, and it was achieved cooperatively before. That raises the real policy criticism of 2026: this was a voluntary-compliance success that, six years later, needed a Supreme Court injunction issued about a week before voting. Carriers, for their part, have already said the measure is not simple because it touches their systems, per Convergência Digital. That is a legitimate operational concern, and a seven-day notice is an unfortunate way to test it.
Three lessons for access policy
- Whitelist by public function, not by platform. Limiting the exemption to jus.br domains and official apps keeps the rule administrable and avoids picking commercial winners among social networks. It also sidesteps the net neutrality objections that broad zero-rating deals attract.
- Fix the process, not just the week. If election-period access is a recurring need, it belongs in a standing, pre-agreed TSE-Anatel-operator protocol with tested technical specifications, as in 2020, rather than an emergency order. Predictability serves carriers, courts and voters better.
- Connectivity gaps are structural. A free window for electoral sites does not address why so many Brazilians depend on a single prepaid phone. The same Cetic.br data shows that mobile-only households are concentrated in lower-income classes: 13% of class DE households rely on mobile-network internet, against 1% in class A. Spectrum policy, competition and affordable fixed broadband do more for democratic participation than any seven-day exemption.
What to watch
Two things will indicate whether this order is a good precedent. First, whether operators implement it on time and without disruption for the first round and any runoff. Second, whether the TSE and Anatel use the post-election period to formalise a permanent mechanism. A well-scoped exemption that works quietly would show that courts can solve a specific access problem without rewriting how mobile data is sold. If implementation falters, the lesson will be the opposite: emergency judicial engineering of network systems is a poor substitute for planning.
The outcome the order protects is simple and worth defending. Every voter should be able to check where to vote and verify what they read, whatever is left on their data plan.