Uncertainty over the outcome of the presidential elections persists in Honduras. The counting of votes stopped this weekend without the electoral authorities accounting for the causes of the delay in a count which still maintains a very close result, but which gives a slight advantage to the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura, supported by Donald Trump and who obtains 40.20% of the votes, while his rival, the liberal Salvador Nasralla, obtains 35.9% of support while more than 88% of the ballots have been counted. The Organization of American States (OAS), through its electoral observation mission, criticized on Saturday “the flagrant lack of expertise in the preparation and execution” of the vote count and called for speeding up the count, while the ruling Free Party demands the cancellation of the presidential election.
The OAS mission, led by former Paraguayan Foreign Minister Eladio Loizaga, highlighted “obvious delays” in the vote count and called for it to be renewed and accelerated “guaranteeing traceability measures that ensure certainty of the results.” In a statement released on Saturday, the organization criticized not only the slowness of the counting of ballots, but also the technical problems encountered during the counting of votes. “The mission noted that the management and processing of electoral materials experienced delays and intermittency. In addition to the above, the OAS noted the marked lack of expertise in the development and execution, particularly of technological solutions, which caused delays in control,” he judged.
Among the main problems recorded by the OAS is the lack of periodic availability of the results disclosed on the website of the National Electoral Council (CNE), which has sparked strong criticism from presidential candidates. “The OAS mission commends the attitude of those who have shown patience, calling for tranquility during this crucial stage of the process. It is essential that citizens and, in particular, political parties continue to exercise the powers of control and surveillance conferred on them by law,” recognized the organization. “The OAS considers it imperative that the electoral authorities fully guarantee that the subsequent stages of the process, including the high volume of registrations not yet counted, the special control phase and the contestation phase, are carried out with total clarity, maximum efficiency and without any type of delay,” it recommends.
The ruling party denounced electoral fraud and demanded that at least the presidential election be annulled. Marlon Ochoa, CNE advisor representing Libre, said “a coup” and “electoral fraud” were plotted against candidate Rixi Moncada. Ochoa said that 86.6% of the minutes show “errors and inconsistencies” in their content, in addition to denouncing “serious” structural failures, such as the slowness in transmitting the results of the minutes, the falsification of voting numbers during election night when they were transmitted by the so-called TREP, a system for transmitting preliminary results.
In a petition sent on Saturday to the CNE, Libre requests the cancellation of the election “due to all the serious acts that violate the Constitution and the Electoral Law”, among which he mentioned the alteration of the will of voters, because they do not recognize a result that leaves Moncada in a distant third place, with only 19% of the votes. Nasralla rejected the request and told local media on Saturday: “We must not cancel the elections, we must have someone to count what has already been voted on.” The elections were clean, what failed was the transmission operator called ASD, a Colombian company with a bad track record, hired at the last minute because there was no time,” he said of the company hired to carry out the recount. Asfura, Trump’s standard-bearer, has not spoken out, but he warned Thursday: “I’m not going to come out and say inconsistencies or fuel uncertainty.”