There were 540 candidates for the 45 seat council, and among them there was a female rhinoceros named Cacareco, meaning ‘rubbish’!
Obviously the citizens had lost all faith in the human candidates because Cacareco won the election by a landslide.
She gathered 100,000 votes – 15% of the total, and was thereby elected by the people to council!
It turns out some students had printed 200,000 ballots with her name on them. The ballots were, however, all legitimately cast by voters. One of them remarked: "Better to elect a rhino than an ass."
The director of the zoo where the four-legged candidate was housed said he would ask Sao Paulo to pay Cacareco's Councilman's salary. Unfortunately election officials did not find this funny, and nullified all ballots with her name on it and declared a new election was to be held within a week.
This type of protest vote was not the first in Brazilian history. In 1954 the people of Jaboatao voted a goat named ‘Smelly’ into council.
Smelly did not win by such a large margin as Cacareco and therefore the rhinoceros remains the most famous animal candidate in history.
