The Latin American Report # 663: A comprehensive update of the electoral landscape in Honduras

The vote counting process in the Honduran general elections continues to be marked by a lack of completeness, which in turn breeds distrust and the expected attacks on the results. Since the last update I provided, Nasry Asfura, the candidate explicitly favored by Donald Trump, managed to overcome the lead held by the other final contender, Salvador Nasralla, early this Thursday. Right now, at 5:32 pm local time in Honduras, the broadcast on Azteca Honduras channel shows Asfura, candidate for the conservative National Party, with about 24,380 votes more than candidate Nasralla, candidate for the Liberal Party, with a certain tendency for that lead to increase. On Tuesday night, the picture was very different, so much so that I predicted an irreversible trend in favor of Nasralla, although he never enjoyed such a wide gap.

The fact that I am obtaining the data through a local television station and not from the official website of the National Electoral Council is a sign of the irregularities that have marred the count. The mission of managing the transmission of electoral records and disseminating their results falls to a Colombian company hired by the electoral authority, a dynamic that I find very debatable. However, it is also claimed that the problem lies with the satellite connectivity service provided to the Electoral Council by a telecommunications consortium and not with the Colombian company. In concrete terms, since Monday the public has not had access to the referred official website, so the national electoral body enabled an exclusive feed for media and political parties, demanding the restoration of the full functionality of the system, which also stopped processing thousands of records received on Sunday.

Thus, according to Yony Bustillo, a journalist for the local media outlet El Heraldo, technology has been the major flaw in the process, and this is not only associated with that very disputed system for managing and disseminating preliminary results, but also with the failures of the biometric identification devices, acknowledged in a muted way somehow by the European Union's Electoral Observation Mission, but not by the OAS so far. The latter is a point that the ruling LIBRE party, whose electoral representative Rixi Moncada is running third in the official count, has denounced as a potential source of electoral fraud, a plausible thesis but in my opinion without the level of representativeness or capacity for critical influence that they suggest. The fact that a certain polling station did not use the biometric device does not imply that the data it recorded in its record are inflated, although it cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, I understand there is a limit to the ability to "inflate" the data, marked by the number of voters associated with each polling station. In this sense, what Moncada has to demonstrate is how many votes above the expected number there are in the 2,629 records from polling centers where the biometric identification device was not used and, coincidentally, one of her two main opponents won, that is: Asfura or Nasralla.

Returning to analyze Asfura's comeback, El Heraldo observes that it is due to the processing of records from departments where "Tito" was the clear favorite. But Nasralla declared that his rival moved ahead through "tricks," also criticizing, from his perspective, the preliminary results transmission system. A specific complaint from his team is that the latter is nullifying records for them, but in truth, from what I have been learning about the convoluted Honduran electoral system, it is not that votes are "lost" but that these records marked as having "inconsistencies" are processed as part of a special scrutiny process that this time could be critical due to how close the race has apparently been.

"They want to create the perception that the National Party is winning by a difference of 20,000 votes and declare themselves winners, something I did not do on Tuesday and Wednesday, when I was winning and I did not declare myself the winner," denounced Nasralla.

Furthermore, the electoral authority will begin on Sunday another special scrutiny process focused on two scenarios of technical problems with records called "contingencies." One of its proprietary councilors called on all candidates "to demonstrate the maturity and stature that this moment demands," in clear reference to Nasralla. Finally, in this update, I will only note that the ruling LIBRE party was also quite battered in the fight for congressional seats, as the conservative parties have a qualified majority to push an agenda contrary to its interests without needing its votes. They also retained few mayoralties.

Trump-related

In truth, the argument is very consistent according to the context 👇:

Violence

I continue with the special monitoring of the problem of violence in Honduras amid the election context. For example, this Thursday authorities recovered a corpse wrapped in plastic bags in a neighborhood located south of Tegucigalpa, the capital, the second case of this type in less than a week, according to reports from La Tribuna. The corpse showed signs of extreme violence. Another gruesome discovery was reported in San Pedro Sula, where the National Police found a corpse in a sack on the side of a street, also wrapped in a black plastic bag. In the same San Pedro Sula, a bus fare collector aged 16 was fatally shot last Wednesday by extortionists, while today was made known the identification of two 18-year-old female youths whose bodies were found last Tuesday on the side of a highway in the department of Lempira.

This is all for today’s report.