Uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential elections continues in Honduras. The counting of votes stopped over the weekend without the electoral authorities reporting on the causes of the delay in a count that still maintains a very close result, but that gives a slight advantage to the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura, supported by Donald Trump and who achieves 40.20% of the votes, while his rival, the liberal Salvador Nasralla, obtains 35.9% of the support when more than 88% of the ballots have been counted. The Organization of American States (OAS), through its electoral observation mission, has criticized this Saturday “the marked lack of expertise in the development and execution” of the vote count and has called for speeding up the counting, while the ruling party, Libre, demands that the presidential election be annulled.
The OAS mission, headed by the former Foreign Minister of Paraguay Eladio Loizaga, has highlighted “obvious delays” in the vote count and has asked to renew and expedite it “guaranteeing traceability measures that provide certainty in the results.” In a statement issued on Saturday, the organization criticized not only the slowness in counting the ballots, but also the technical problems recorded during the counting of the votes. “The mission has taken note that the management and processing of electoral material has registered delays and intermittencies. In addition to the above, the OAS has registered the marked lack of expertise in the development and execution, especially of technological solutions, which has caused delays in the scrutiny,” he judged.
Among the main problems registered by the OAS is the lack of availability at intervals of the results disclosed on the site of the National Electoral Council (CNE), which has generated strong criticism from the presidential candidates. “The OAS mission salutes the attitude of those who have maintained patience, calling for tranquility during this crucial stage of the process. It is essential that citizens and, especially, political parties continue to exercise the powers of supervision and surveillance that the Law confers on them,” the organization acknowledged. “The OAS considers it imperative that the electoral authorities fully guarantee that the subsequent stages of the process, including the high volume of records not yet accounted for, the special scrutiny and the challenges phase, are carried out with total clarity, maximum efficiency and without any type of delay,” it recommended.
The ruling party has denounced fraud in the elections and has asked that at least the presidential elections be annulled. Marlon Ochoa, CNE advisor representing Libre, said that “a coup” and “electoral fraud” have been plotted against candidate Rixi Moncada. Ochoa said that 86.6% of the minutes show “errors and inconsistencies” in their contents, in addition to denouncing “serious” structural failures, such as the slowness in the transmission of the results of the minutes, adulteration of the vote numbers during the election night while they were transmitted by the so-called TREP, a system for transmitting preliminary results.
In a petition sent to the CNE this Saturday, Libre demands the annulment of the election “due to all the serious acts that violate the Constitution and the Electoral Law”, among which he has mentioned alteration of the will of the voters, since they do not recognize a result that leaves Moncada in a distant third place, with just 19% of the votes. Nasralla has rejected this request and this Saturday he told the local media: “We must not annul the elections, we must have someone to count what was already voted. The elections were clean, what failed was the transmission operator called ASD, a Colombian company with a bad record, hired at the last minute because there was no time,” he said in relation to the company hired to carry out the recount. Asfura, Trump’s standard-bearer, has not spoken, but on Thursday he warned: “I will not go out and say inconsistencies or fuel uncertainty.”
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