Is valid vote free of risk? The impact of the second-round of 2020 municipal elections on covid-19 cases and deaths in Brazil

In Brazil, municipalities with more than 200,000 voters are expected to hold a second round of voting whenever no candidate for mayor reaches the majority of valid votes in the first round. Thus, some municipalities that meet this criterion have an electoral campaign extended for at least two more weeks and an additional presence of voters and poll officials at the polling place. This article explores the natural experiment generated by the second-round of the 2020 Brazilian municipal elections to assess the impacts of the electoral process on the spread of covid-19 in Brazil. To this end, it uses weekly information from recorded cases and deaths from covid-19 to estimate twoway fixed effects difference in differences models. The results indicate that, in general, despite the worsening of the pandemic in the period studied, the municipalities that held a second-round election did not show an increase in cases and deaths by covid-19 after the election.