The Tribunal Supremo Electoral has tallied approximately 54% of the national vote, they told us last night before suspending work until later today.
Their website-- not always accessible-- is posting preliminary numbers by Departamento (state, for North Americans).
Looking over those numbers, albeit preliminary, we are struck by the report for Cortés-- the Departamento in which is located San Pedro Sula, second-largest city and industrial capital of the country.
These show Salvador Nasralla of the Partido Anti-Corrupción leading with 35.1% of the vote.
LIBRE is in second place, with 23.46% of the votes.
The Partido Nacional is in the third place with 22.15%.
The Liberal Party is down at 18.8%
That strikes us as very, very odd. There was at least one report from an electoral mesa yesterday that said LIBRE votes were being reported as PAC votes. But that would take a lot of votes to be shifted: PAC is said to have 122,362 votes to LIBRE's 81,796.
The total for Cortés is only up to about 350,000 votes. Only 168,863 of those votes come from San Pedro Sula, so there is obviously room for change here.
But it still calls our attention to see PAC seeming to lead, not only in Cortés, but in San Pedro Sula itself (with 36.42% of the counted votes).
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3 comments:
I'm curious to know your reasoning for calling the result odd.
In elections, it often helps to compare results at the top of the ballot with lower levels. It's technically more difficult to switch votes on multiple candidates without detection.
According to La Prensa, PAC won 6 of 20 deputies, while Libre and PN won 5. One could tally the votes for all the diputados and get a more precise estimate of public sentiment. I did not do that calculation. But at a glance, it looks to me as if PAC did do well in Cortés.
As one of your earlier posts showed, on a national levels, Hernández was taking support from Nasralla. So, a strong showing for Nasralla is consistent with a weak showing for Hernández.
But speaking of odd, have you seen this AP article? In Tiempo's phrase, alta es la noche, indeed.
At the time I wrote the post, there were no numbers posted yet for diputados. While the voting for diputados uses a separate ballot and ballot box (thus meaning that unfortunately, there could be shenanigans with each independently) I agree that having diputados from PAC win echoes Nasralla leading for President in Cortés.
Right now, the TSE website does have those numbers but we won't be trying to drill down tonight; first impressions are consistent with the La Prensa story. It still surprises us, given our own knowledge of the political history, to see Cortés go so heavily for PAC.
PAC showing well-- along with LIBRE-- and reported high voter turnout are reasons for cautious optimism. While the voters wouldn't merge, if you add LIBRE and PAC that is a plurality voting against the old two party system. Unfortunately, that still leaves the country with a PN government-- but maybe one that will have to negotiate in congress over policy, which would be much healthier than the post-coup iron grip PN gradually honed.
Alberto Arce has been doing some splendid reporting for AP from Honduras. I think he (and other foreign media) were expecting violence, presumably because people were telling them to expect violence. So the night being quiet is noteworthy.
The TSE was updating its counts, just not releasing statements each time they did. Which seems smarter to us than their initial push to announce numbers they immediately tried to disclaim as not even "tendencias". The problem being that we know the numbers, but don't know right away where those numbers are coming from.
There's a list of actas circulating in facebook that do not match their data in the TSE website.
Too long to post here due to character limit. Here's a google docs file for your viewing:
http://goo.gl/4YJ3OG
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