{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"Vote Tião","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/69304179d6bc23eda246da43/5899fad4-8c35-4438-9615-16cbe8994249.jpg?height=200","description":"Rio de Janeiro, 1988. Brazil had just emerged from twenty-one years of military rule, inflation was running at over seven hundred percent, and the city had just declared bankruptcy. Into this fury stepped Tião — a bad-tempered chimpanzee at the Rio Zoo, famous for throwing mud at visiting politicians, who had struck three different mayors on record. A group of satirists from two comedy magazines decided he was the obvious candidate for mayor. They printed badges, sold T-shirts, held a packed campaign rally, and appointed a comedian named Bussunda as his press secretary, who held real press conferences with a completely straight face. Because this was 1988 and voting was done by hand, every single one of Tião's votes required a grown adult to walk into a booth and write a monkey's name on a ballot — deliberately, privately, on purpose. Around four hundred thousand of them did. Every vote was nullified. But Tião had out-polled real, registered politicians, finishing where third place would have been. He was not even the first: in 1959, a rhinoceros named Cacareco had received one hundred thousand votes in São Paulo's city council elections. It was, it turned out, a tradition — a specifically Brazilian way of saying something to the people in charge. It ended only in 1996, when Brazil switched to electronic voting machines. You cannot write a rhinoceros's name on a touchscreen.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}