In most democracies, citizens go to the polls. But in Brazil’s sparsely populated Amazon region, the polls often go to the voters.
Most people in the vast rainforest live in urban areas, but thousands reside in tiny villages several days from the nearest city by boat. Amazonas, Brazil’s biggest state, is triple the size of California yet has only about one-third the population of greater Los Angeles. More than half its cities can’t be reached at all by road, and some are hundreds of kilometers from the state capital, Manaus.
