Party politics in Honduras, post 2017

While the OAS has not recognized the outcome of the presidential election, Juan Orlando Hernández is proceeding as if the election is settled. Meanwhile, media and political observers from outside Honduras have pivoted to critiques of Salvador Nasralla, Manuel Zelaya, or both for supposedly playing their cards the wrong way, and for the actions each is taking now.

This seems entirely misguided to us. It is worth noting that there was never a chance that Hernández would concede that the election was fraudulent. We doubt that he would have done anything even if the US placed pressure on him, beyond what he is doing: calling for a national "dialogue" that, as in his previous dialogues, is controlled by him and excludes those who view him as corrupt and illegitimate.

Given that reality, it is worth emphasizing that having the officially reported election results come in so close was surprising, and probably not just to those of us watching from outside. Poll tallies that came in as paper documents and were not scanned at the election site appear to have been manipulated. But those transmitted directly as scans allowed the popularity of opposition to Hernández to show clearly.

Which brings us to the next steps: what is happening, and what should we make of it?

Much is being made of the fact that Nasralla and Zelaya are proceeding separately. International commentators seem to be fascinated with the personality issues involved, and ignore the fact that the Alianza was not a party. It was formed under Honduran electoral law that allows for alliances.

Technically, the Alianza joined two existing parties: Libre and PINU. The party founded by Nasralla, PAC (Partido Anti-corrupción), was originally supposed to form part of the Alianza as well.

However, PAC was taken over in May by dissidents, after the TSE declared their original primary null and void on a technicality. The Honduran press described this situation as a mess. As reports published outside Honduras made clear, this culminated a move by a faction in PAC that was tied to the Partido Nacional.

So in the aftermath of the November election, Nasralla has no party affiliation. He has announced that he is starting over again, pushing for a fuerza nacional-- a national political movement, which in Honduras is a first step to forming a party. Nasralla specifically called for participation by "the Alianza that gave him the electoral triumph"

which will be expanded with all the other sectors of the country that oppose the dictatorship such as the people who have demonstrated in the streets, workers, the church, honest businessmen, unions, the Partido Liberal, and the youth that always accompanied him.

This is playing a long game, looking forward to the next election in 2021. It represents a calculated attempt to broaden his original constituency, appealing to the remnants of the Liberal Partido, which came in third in the national presidential race, but also inviting people who may have supported the Alianza but be less comfortable with Libre's strong social democratic agenda.

Nasralla doesn't really have any other choice if he wants to influence the political future. There is no "Alianza" party of which he might be called the leader in Congress. The shell of PAC, led by his rival, managed to win 1 seat in congress (with less than 1% of the vote nationally). In fact, even in the 2013 elections, PAC only gained 13 seats in the congress. It was always a presidential movement, created by a prominent and visible person, but not anything like a traditional party.

The stakes are different for Zelaya. With the end of the presidential campaign, he returns to his position as leader of Libre. Libre is a party that was built by experienced politicians, and includes a substantial national congressional presence. Libre won 30 seats in Congress (with 23% of the vote nationally). That's a net gain of two seats.

Libre actually overtook what remains of the Partido Liberal, which saw its congressional delegation shrink from 33 to 26 (with 20% of the national vote). The Liberal Party continues to work through the aftermath of the 2009 coup, which was led by one faction within the party against the sitting president from the same party. When Zelaya created Libre, many progressives that formerly were Partido Liberal members followed him.

One of the dynamics to watch is what will become of the remains of the Liberal Party. Luis Zelaya, the candidate for president, was an unexpected choice, a university professor with no history of political office holding. Part of his motivations for seeking office parallel those that guided Nasralla: the corruption scandal in the Honduran social services agency, IHSS. He also was moved by the extra-judicial killing of a university student.

Luis Zelaya shocked most observers when he supported the assertion by Nasralla that the Alianza candidate was the real winner of the contest. He has remained firm on this point. That has led to calls from within what his supporters call the lado oscuro or Dark Side of the party for his removal from his leadership of the party. Zelaya has openly accused those calling for his removal of being in a "perverse" coalition with the Partido Nacional.

Back in early 2015, Mauricio Villeda, then leader of the Liberal Party, was part of the first agreement to oppose the re-election of Juan Orlando Hernández. As recently as this spring, political strategists in Honduras were writing about his chances of leading a three-party alliance in the presidential race.

Which brings us to the next four years. If the Partido Liberal follows Zelaya, and he and his congressional delegation coordinate with Libre, they would form a voting bloc of 56 members, facing the Partido Nacional's 61 (based on a national vote of just under 48%).  This is enough on its own to block some of the constitutional moves that have been a staple of Hernández' consolidation of power.

And they could do more, with sufficient focus. The remaining 11 seats in Congress went to minority parties. The remnant PAC is suspected of being a National Party adherent. Other small parties that were floated as potential participants in a National Party alliance were the PUD, PDCH, FAPER and Vamos.

Only the first two of these political movements had seats in the previous congress, holding a total of five. PUD held on to its seat, but the PDCH lost three, ending up with a single seat. That brings the total votes that normally follow Hernández automatically to 63. This is two less than a majority in the 128 seat congress.

Adding the 4 congressional seats won by PINU to those of Libre, with which it formed the Alianza, would point to a core opposition of 34 votes. If the Partido Liberal under Luis Zelaya can work with Libre and PINU in the next congress on issues where they share concerns, they would still be at a disadvantage, with a total of 60 votes.

The wild card is something called the Partido Alianza Patriotica. It received enough votes in this election to receive 4 seats in congress. It ran the general who carried out the 2009 coup, Romeo Vásquez Velasquez. Not surprisingly, he ran on a tough on crime, support the military platform. In 2013, its first campaign, the party didn't even win a single congressional seat. So there's no history to go on.

And of course, there's the lone Partido Anti-corrupción diputado elected, who just may turn out to have more leverage than expected.

OAS calls for new elections in Honduras

Today witnessed a series of press conferences in the contested Honduran election.

Shortly after the OAS Mission said it would be making a statement late today, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral announced its own announcement would be made earlier in the day.

Not surprisingly, given previous statements, the TSE's announcement was their conclusion that the presidential election had been won by Juan Orlando Hernández, of the Partido Nacional. Neither the Partido Liberal nor the Alianza formed by two opposition parties, the Partido Anti-corrupción and LIBRE, have accepted the vote tallies posted by the TSE, alleging a number of different kinds of fraud.

There is also a potential legal issue left unaddressed: whether the candidacy of Hernández was entirely legal. The current president ran for an unprecedented second term under a Honduran constitution that prohibited even talk of re-election, until a Supreme Court he shaped while head of Congress ruled otherwise. The Supreme Court ruling opened the door to re-election. But lawmakers in Honduras did not pass any legislation authorizing re-election. Technically, then, this is not just an unprecedented election outcome: it is one that took place outside any defined legal framework.

Both the European Union and the Organization of American States are on record as seeing the electoral process as problematic. While the EU released a statement today that many read as supporting the TSE's conclusion, the OAS today signaled more reservations, beginning with statements by Secretary General Luis Almagro on Twitter.

These were expanded in the OAS announcement this evening that the Secretary General of the OAS cannot provide certainty about the results of the election. The press release reiterates previous descriptions of the electoral process as "characterized by irregularities and deficiencies" and of "very low technical quality" and "lacking integrity".

The press release continues:

in the face of the impossibility of determining a winner, the only road possible for the winner to be the Honduran people is a new called to general elections, within the strictest respect for the rule of law, with  guarantees of a TSE that would enjoy the technical capacity and the confidence of the citizenry and the political parties.

This is followed by the appointment of a commission from the OAS of ex-presidents Jorge Quiroga and Alvaro Colom to "carry out the necessary work for a new electoral process and national democratic reconciliation in Honduras".

The full basis for this position is contained in the OAS mission's report to the Secretary General. It rehearses all the weaknesses in the electoral process. It calls allowing a run for re-election based on a court finding (without implementing legislation in place) a "bad practice...that revived the polarization generated by the coup and political crisis of 2009".

The OAS report also provides a new statistical analysis by Professor Irfan Nooruddin of Georgetown University addressing whether the sharp change in voting patterns noted after a break in counting could be explained in any innocent way.

This retraces some of the terrain covered by an analysis in The Economist that concluded that the shifts in voting seen were very unlikely.

Professor Nooruddin uses additional techniques, and concludes "on the basis of this analysis, I would reject the proposition that the National Party won the election
legitimately."

We will revisit these statistical analyses tomorrow, explaining what they do (and do not) show, and relate those observations to some of the known problems in the conduct of Honduran elections in general, and this one in particular.

For now, though, the question is: will Juan Orlando Hernández accept the OAS recommendation? Or does he think he can ignore the massive resistance to his re-election that has already led to almost two dozen deaths of protesters, and the closure of roads across the country?

Analyses support doubts about vote and OAS disclaims results while police refuse to stop protests

Our headline may seem to juxtapose three unrelated things. But we think they have to be seen together. And actually, there's one more thing... and it's a doozy.

To recap where the process stands: the TSE resumed counting vote tallies without representatives of the other parties. At the end, it says its count shows the incumbent president with a lead of around 55,000 votes. According to the TSE, the next step is for the parties to register challenges and petitions, within 10 days, and then within 20 days the TSE will certify an outcome to the election.

(In reporting this story, the Voice of America slipped up, describing Juan Orlando Hernández as "U.S.-backed"; the US doesn't normally take sides in a foreign election.)

No one who has watched the situation unfold can be completely satisfied that the vote count has been transparent or without problems. Unexplained prolonged delays in posting numbers, computer crashes that received different explanations at different times, and above all, the weird behavior of the numbers before and after the more than day-long delay, have Hondurans and international observers alike worried.

The OAS actually went so far in its preliminary report to conclude that "the tight margin of the results, and the irregularities, errors and systemic problems that have surrounded this election do not allow the Mission to have certainty about the results".

In the body of the report, the OAS expresses concerns about the vote counting process, noting some ballot boxes arrived open, missing documents, or without security. They also write that after initially counting ballots as they arrived, at some point the TSE "altered the order" to use "criteria that were not explained". So the vote counting switched from non-selective, to selective-- but we don't know what criteria were used to select votes to count.

The OAS concluded that the only route out would be for the main candidates to negotiate an agreement to review the 1000+ poll tallies that were scrutinized for inconsistencies, as well as recount the 5000+ tallies counted after the initial phase of vote counting, when the trend changed, as well as do a complete recount of three departments (Lempira, La Paz, and Intibuca), rural states that had exaggeratedly high reported voter turnout. That is a complete endorsement of the position of the Alianza.

Independently, The Economist, which previously published an article about a tape they received apparently showing training of National Party operatives in ways to cheat, undertook a statistical analysis that gives support to Alianza complaints that the change in voting trends after the break in counting is statistically improbable.

And that brings us to today's amazing development: the police across Honduras, including the US supported militarized policing units, standing down and returning to their bases, refusing to follow the orders they received to stop protests. Under the state of exception declared by Juan Orlando Hernández, free circulation in the country was limited, a night time curfew was declared, and the armed forces and police were directed to remove protesters. What followed was violence, including deadly violence.

Announcing their stand-down, the national police spokesman said "“We want peace, and we will not follow government orders – we’re tired of this". 

When a sitting president who has concentrated power loses the ability to command the police, it is a signal of loss of control over the forces necessary to maintain dominance. Even if the TSE were to declare him the winner, it is not clear how governable Honduras would be for a president who took advantage of a somewhat ambiguous court ruling to seek a deeply unpopular second term in office.

After the 2013 election, when Hernández received only 37% of the vote, the three parties that split the majority of the presidential votes did not cooperate as a concerted opposition. This time around, two of those parties entered an alliance and ran an agreed on presidential candidate.  This time, the Liberal Party candidate who trailed in the polls has been vocal in saying his review of the poll tallies says the Alianza won, and has supported their calls for a recount, even a full 100% recount if needed.

And here's the extra bit: according to a Honduran lawyer, whose twitter profile says she is a Liberal Party member, election law actually demands a recount of some votes already.

This isn't because of the uncertainties about counting the poll tallies that are already being debated.

It's because the margin between candidates is less than the number of null votes. Null votes are those marked as invalid at the polling place, and thus not included in the totals on the poll tallies from which the central electoral authorities work.

The law appears to require reviewing the null votes from the original ballots, if there are more of them than the margin between candidates. With around 55,000 votes officially between the two candidates, the number of votes marked null at the polling places is 135,000.

The TSE is unlikely to do any of this. Unfortunately, we doubt Hernández will risk the victory he went so far to gain and agree to the kind of recount and scrutiny of the counting process that is being called for by the Alianza, the Liberal Party-- and the OAS.

Until the army stands down and returns to its barracks. Unlikely, yes. But stranger things seem to be happening...

Election update: four days since polling ended

Yesterday the Tribunal Supremo Electoral said it would make an announcement of final vote count at 3 AM local time Thursday.

One assumes that was a projection based on the pace of counting, not (just) a way to try to avoid having people awake and paying attention. We did not set an alarm, which is just as well, since nothing was announced at 3 AM.

In part, that may be due to an as-yet incompletely explained event that affected the computer equipment Wednesday evening. This took the entire TSE system down with about 82% of the votes counted-- just after the vote had swung slightly to favor Hernández.

The explanation offered by David Matamoros, head of the electoral tribunal, was that this was a computer breakdown, due to the high volume of data being too much for the system used, requiring additional servers to come online. Continuing a pattern of uncertainty and confusion stemming from the Tribunal, another tribunal member, Marco Ramiro Lobo, was quoted as saying the system had been "hacked".

Regardless of the actual cause, the break in the technology came at an unfortunate point in the process. Moments before, an agreement (since repudiated) was released, brokered by the OAS, in which the two candidates agreed to accept the numbers that the TSE was supposed to be reporting in the early morning.

At 8 AM Thursday, Tegucigalpa time, the count is still stalled at just under 89%.

The vote count posted favors Juan Orlando Hernández by 23,000, out of a total of 2.92 million votes-- less than 1% difference.

Due to the procedures used by the electoral tribunal, it is impossible to be certain which polling places have yet to be tabulated. Where the 11% of votes still outstanding comes from is critical, because of the sharp differences in vote preference from region to region.

For example, in the Department of Cortes, where Salvador Nasralla has won 56% of the 404,000 votes counted, we can compare to the 2013 results, which showed a total of 516,000 voters. The possibility of there being more than 100,000 votes still uncounted from this region could be enough to shift the totals, if the current 56%/32% split of vote there continued, as that would be a 24,000 vote advantage for Nasralla.

This won't be settled until every vote has been counted. As the slow process drips on, Honduran citizens continue to have their trust in democratic institutions eroded.

And it appears that the almost inevitable round of repression of protest has also begun, with twitter reporting (and photos confirming) the militarized police or military tear-gassing protesters assembled outside the location of the counting in Tegucigalpa last evening.

It could be easy to lose sight of one clear lesson in this election: even if the incumbent president somehow holds on for a second term, against the popular rejection of presidential re-election seen in pre-election opinion surveys, the opposition campaign mobilized a far larger group of voters than international observers expected.

They maintained the level of support seen in the 2013 election, when it was split between the component Partido Anti-corrupción and LIBRE parties that make up the present Alianza, thus allowing Hernández to win with only 37% of the 2013 vote.

Whether denied office this year or not, the Alianza should be a political force to reckon with over the next four years, representing as many Honduran voters as the Partido Nacional, inheriting the role long played by the now diminished Partido Liberal as the counter to that political force.

What may be coming in the Honduran election

Honduras' Proceso Digital has a story today based on an interview with a member of the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), Marco Ramiro Lobo. The headline says it all: "La tendencia presidencial se mantiene".

The presidential projection is staying the same.

Salvador Nasralla of the Alianza, the founder of the Partido Anti-corrupción, is maintaining a lead of 45.17% to 40.21% over the sitting president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who pushed his Partido Nacional into an unprecedented and unpopular campaign for re-election.
 Early this morning, the TSE reported tabulated votes for about 1,992,128 voters, of which about 95% were valid.

Ramiro Lobo confirms what has been reported based on the information given to the Alianza (and other parties) by the TSE: the vote count is complete for the major cities, which on-the ground reports say all went for Nasralla.

This raises the question-- with the majority of the votes counted, what, if anything, might change the current projection?

First in the fears of many Hondurans is corruption in vote counting, either locally or nationally.

The TSE counts votes from each individual mesa electoral, or polling place (MER). The ballots are counted at the polling place, and a report, called an acta, is sent to the TSE, along with the sealed ballot box, which allows for checking the count made originally.

This transmission chain introduces multiple points where people feared voting fraud could take place.

In the 2013 election, suspected fraud ranged from, at the local level, not counting votes that were actually cast; to changing the numbers transmitted to the TSE; to the infamous and clearly demonstrated pattern of "over-voting", where in a few districts, a much higher turnout was reported-- sometimes more than 100% of the registered voters.

Each MER is supposed to have the same number of potential voters. If more voters turn out in some polling places, the proportion of votes theoretically could diverge from the national tendency. This happened in 2013, and the over votes went largely to the National Party candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández.

This suspicious pattern was detected in 2013 by a distributed social media campaign to recalculate the totals from the published actas (an effort in which we participated).

This time around, the TSE did not publish those documents right away. But it did share them with the political parties. The Alianza set up its own recount process in anticipation of similar problems. It has not yet reported any.

The fact that the Alianza counts and those later confirmed by the TSE agree goes a long way to assuring that outright vote alteration is not happening after the actas reach Tegucigalpa.

So we have a couple of other possibilities to consider. First, the TSE said last night that it is still waiting for delivery of the sealed ballot boxes and counts from some places. These would by definition be from remote locations. They could, in theory, have different political views than the urban population.

But it would take an enormous swing towards Hernández to shift a 5% lead with only 40% of the vote still to count. And in the vote totals from more rural places posted by the TSE so far, this does not seem to be happening.

With the major cities already reported, the polling places not yet counted must be from the primarily rural areas of the country-- the northeast coast, inland Olancho, and southwest Lenca region. There are a few ways that this vote might shift the picture, but all of them seem unlikely, and the evidence available doesn't support expecting them to radically alter the pattern that has emerged.


First, Ramiro Lobo said explicitly that as the TSE is continuing its count, the original tendency established based on about 10,000 actas is being maintained.

Ramiro Lobo's statement to the press seems to be primarily to counter questions raised about why it took the TSE until 2 AM to report preliminary results. He says that when they counted the first 1500 actas, they had a statistical tie, so they kept counting until the difference was 5% and kept staying the same.

In other words, the TSE doesn't expect things to change, and is not seeing changes as it continues to count the remaining actas, including those from more rural locations.
 Even Juan Orlando Hernández, while still claiming his own information has him 7 points ahead of Nasralla, has now shifted from citing exit polling (done by a firm controlled by a former member of his government) to emphasizing that the TSE "recognizes" that its count is not "conclusive".

His statements may point to what he is hoping will change what seems like an inevitable loss. He is quoted as counter-factually claimed that the TSE had only counted 20% of the vote, when they reported having counted 59% of the vote. The comments reported have him claiming the pro-Nasralla counts reflect only votes from the two main cities (San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa). His hopes, it would seem, are tied to the country-side.

Unfortunately for these hopes, his math makes no sense.

The population of the top 20 Honduran cities in 2017 was 2,236,731. These top 20 cities only make up about 25% of the population of Honduras. With 59% of the vote counted by the TSE, that should mean that about 34% of the rural districts have already been counted-- and again, as Ramiro Lobo notes, continued counting is not changing the pattern.

So could it be that there is a specific rural area where Hernández is expecting either a higher turnout (over-voting, like the pattern that benefited him in 2013), or a radically higher proportion of the vote to go his way?

The posted data from the TSE show his highest support coming in the rural departments of the southwest part of the country. In Lempira, he currently holds a 58% to 33% advantage, and in Intibuca, a 52% to 30% advantage.

But the absolute number of voters in these departments is small-- a total of 47,000 reported from Lempira, and 37,000 from Intibuca. And by all accounts, this is where he can be expected to do best, as a native son.

In scenarios we have tried out, Hernández would need to have high over-voting in all remaining districts and have them vote on the lines of his core constituency to pull out a win so narrow it would be a statistical tie.

Other rural areas that the TSE is reporting already depart from any winning model. In Olancho, with 96,000 votes counted, the Alianza is ahead with 45% of the vote to the Partido Nacional's 44%. In Gracias a Dios, the vast eastern department, only 835 votes have been counted, with the Alianza and Partido Nacional each receiving about 33% of the vote. For Hernández, tying in the rural portions of Honduras is simply not enough to win.

Thus we come to our final observations about what may be coming in this election.

First, with the collapse of any opposition in the Honduran print press, the role of social media has increase dramatically,

On Twitter, get out the vote efforts were undertaken by Alianza supporters as "Operation Cusuco".

An independent collective of community media calling itself "Guancasco de Medios" also used Twitter to consolidate and share electoral information.

The imagery in both cases is fundamentally Honduran: cusuco is the local name for the armadillo, whose tenacity in digging in is legendary-- like hunting a cusuco, participants went to the houses of those who might not have otherwise come out to vote. The guancasco is the ancient Lenca practice of inter-community visits accompanied by ceremonies, through which peer to peer politics were transacted.

Poll watchers for the Alianza also used Twitter, to report vote totals they recorded as they concluded their work. This kind of publishing of vote totals, while unofficial, helps limit how the final official count could change-- or at the very least, would require justifications that the TSE does not, remarkably, seem inclined to even propose.

There is no reason to simply accept the claims by TSE officials to be disinterested stewards of the franchise. But there is every reason to see them as unwilling to take political heat when emerging voting patterns already circulating did not support the claims made by the sitting president.

Finally, the organization of poll watchers and national and international observers has to have changed the atmosphere. There are reports of violence against political activists, and international observers have not necessarily been welcomed.

But along with the role of social media, the presence of poll watchers and international and national observers has made it harder for real fraud to be carried out-- at least as reflected in results so far.

The TSE reports... the Alianza is in the lead

It took them until almost 2 in the morning in Honduras, but finally, the TSE has made an official statement.

Not calling the election: they will continue to count votes until they are finished.

But with 59% of the votes counted officially by the TSE, the reported proportion of votes is:

Salvador Nasralla             45.7%
Juan Orlando Hernández 40.21%

A couple of things to note:

The TSE also said it may be Thursday before they get to some of the votes. They have yet to post the vote totals on their website, which will allow us to assess which parts of the country have been counted, and see whether the votes not yet counted could change the outcome.

At the same time, to come out with such a strong and marked difference in favor of Nasralla might suggest that the TSE thinks this pattern is likely to hold up; otherwise, we would expect them to maintain a more cautious approach, perhaps reporting a lower proportion of the counted votes with a tighter field.

The next few days will be tense and it is critical that international observers keep watching.

Electoral coverage: Part one

At the New York Times, Elizabeth Malkin continues to provide some of the best informed coverage of Honduras in the English language media. Her story on the election lays out clearly the reasons many Hondurans are unhappy with this election, and think it is already stolen: the approval of re-election by a Supreme Court a majority of whose justices owe their office to the current president's actions when he was head of Congress; "reforms" of election processes that give that president's party more control over ballot counting; and the public and notorious evidence of corrupt practices by the same party in the last election.

Meanwhile, Reuters provides what purports to be a simple comparison of the proposed policies of the National Party and Alianza candidates for president. It's textbook example of how to make a selective case without seeming to have an opinion. Start with the characterization of Juan Orlando Hernández as US-friendly and approved by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. The implication would be that Salvador Nasralla and the Alianza are somehow anti-US. That's not really the difference between the two parties: Honduran political parties all want good relations with the US. What the National Party provides, though, is a willing partner in militarization of policing in Honduras that some US policy makers think is a key to ending drug trafficking (or at least diminishing it). Hernández also has accepted US characterization of undocumented migration to the US as his country's problem, leading him to militarize the borders to stop people fleeing violence in the cities and drug-dominated areas.

Reuters pairs the pro-US characterization of Hernández with a description of the Alianza as supposedly dominated by former president Mel Zelaya, saying "many believe" Zelaya is the "true force" behind the Alianza. This echoes the line taken by the National Party in an attempt to discourage voters in Honduras from supporting the opposition. It ignores the reality that Salvador Nasralla is the Alianza candidate because his insurgent party, the Partido Anti-corrupcíon, ran strongly in the 2013 election. Nasralla leads his own political movement, and the fact that what were competing parties in 2013 have now joined forces is a testament to the common goals of Libre and PAC: removing power from the traditional parties seen as corrupt bastions of an oligarchy.

Reuters also reports that polls show Hérnandez leading. They don't identify the polls, or give a link. Three polling companies were approved to do polls by the Honduran electoral tribunal, a new practice that narrowed the data stream when compared to 2013. One of the approved companies is the consultant used by the National Party. Legally, none of them are allowed to poll after September, so any polls from these official sources would be stale. Private polling done by the parties might be available, but legally, they also cannot share any such information.

One effect of published claims that Hernández has an established lead, of course, is to give his election an aura of inevitability. That could hamper efforts already promised by both the Alianza and the Liberal Party (the traditional opposition, depleted in the wake of the 2009 coup and fourth in votes for presidency in 2013) to contest any hint of fraud.

There are already reports from Honduras of intimidation of poll watchers. Some international observers have been refused entry into the country.

TeleSur has a worthwhile infographic showing voting results based on exit polling. So far, Hernández is getting fewer votes than the last published polls, while the Liberal party candidate is drawing significantly more votes.

Obviously, we have no idea which parts of the country this exit polling reflects. But the present numbers show, again, the National Party falling far below a majority, with the number of votes going to the Alianza and Liberal parties together surpassing the National Party vote.

Because of Honduran law, a plurality of votes, no matter how low, will win the office. It will be important to watch how international media report the results: a minority win should not be portrayed as legitimating the National Party. And equally, the international press needs to cover what happens after this election, how complaints are treated, and not accept the deterioration of public trust as somehow inevitable.

Election Sunday

In Honduras, national elections are held on a Sunday in late November, every four years. Even in 2009, following the coup that removed the president, the national election process went on.

This year will mark the second presidential election after the coup. Two things emerged from that rupture that make this an unprecedented election day: viable opposition parties emerged; and the ruling party overturned the very part of the constitution that was claimed, however falsely, by supporters of the 2009 coup to be the cause of their actions, the constitutional bar against presidential re-election.

Two new national political movements, Libre (coming out of the coalition of resistance to the coup), and the Anti-corruption Party (led by a political outsider with substantial public visibility) ran candidates in the 2013 presidential election. Their officially recorded votes were more than the votes recorded for the candidate for the National Party that had regained power in the 2009 election. Because Honduras does not require any specific level of votes to win an election, the leading candidate from the National Party, with his minority of votes, was installed as president in 2014.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the widespread suppression of election workers, and the ensuing doubts about the validity of even the slim electoral victory the National Party gained. Since the installation of the current president, more and more details have come out about electoral corruption, and disclosures are rumored to involve family members of the sitting president.

Libre and the Anti-corruption party did not gain a majority of seats in the Honduran Congress in 2013, and the fourth major group, the Liberal Party, refused to join them in opposition.

So the National Party president has been able to pursue his aims for the last four years. While some reported decline in murder rates gets positive attention from international governments, on the ground, the level of violence in the cities is still high, and targeting of activists for the environment and human rights is just as much of a problem.

One of the most significant moves made by the current ruling party is the second feature that makes this year's election more significant than any since the current Honduran constitution was ratified, less than forty years ago. That was gaining the approval of the Honduran Supreme Court for presidential election. The Honduran Supreme Court justices are selected by the Congress, where the current president was previously head of Congress. The court whose composition he influenced then over-turned that part of the constitution.

So in this election, the sitting president is his party's candidate for election, with the ban on re-election removed, despite reports that almost two-thirds of the population oppose re-election.

Libre and the Anti-corruption Party have made a pact for the current presidential election, supporting a single candidate under the banner of alliance, Alianza. This candidate, the head of the Anti-corruption party, Salvador Nasralla, is also supported by one of the small parties that fill out the Honduran political landscape, PINU.

Unlike in the last election, when we were able to track multiple polls published in Honduras, we have little official polling data to draw on. The Honduran press landscape has changed: Tiempo, the one source we could count on for news that was not distorted to support the party in power, exists only as a shadow of its former self following the politically motivated prosecution of the family that owned it.

The last polling data published in Honduras in September, before a legally-mandated quiet period when no polls can be published, was sharply contested by the other parties. It reported the incumbent leading, again without a majority, drawing 37% of the vote. While there are more recent reports in newspapers in Mexico citing other polling companies, we have no information that would cause us to trust the polls they report. One was working for the National Party itself. The second came nowhere close to accuracy in the last election. None of the polls we have been able to review were published with sufficient information about methodology or margin of error, and we couldn't track any single poll over time as we did previously.

Private polling from Honduras that we have seen says that the National Party candidate is running behind the Alianza. So might common sense: Honduras has not been united by his presidency, trust in public institutions is no higher, the average Honduran is not materially better off, the country's GDP per capita has declined. The current president doesn't even have the support of all his party, many of whom continue to believe that the bar on re-election should be observed, even if it is legally not required.

And of course, the National Party candidate didn't actually gain the most votes last time. As long as the Libre voters and PINU voters from last time join the Anti-corruption voters, we would expect a plurality of votes for the Alianza. The role of spoiler will continue to be played by the remnants of the Liberal party, which could drain off enough of the voters opposed to re-election, ironically, to ensure a National Party victory. But we don't see it as a clear outcome, nor do Hondurans with whom we are in contact.

Which is why people in Honduras are convinced that there will be electoral manipulation. There are disinformation campaigns, like one this week claiming "Venezuelans" have entered the country to disrupt the election.

Venezuelans play the role of scary outsiders to raise echoes of ALBA, repudiated after the coup, to try to tar the Alianza with the ties of the Zelaya administration. The rumors that armed Venezuelans will commit violence also form a convenient pre-made cover story for any violence that might happen.

We also know of campaign workers for the Alianza who have been killed, as happened in the last election, when poll watchers for the opposition parties were not able to serve in all electoral venues.

But the main route to stealing this election that all Honduran observers expect is the same thing that occurred last time: manipulating the count of the votes at the level of the local ballot box. Stuffing of the ballot boxes was suspected last election from over-votes, when more people are reported to vote than are supposed to be registered. Intimidation of ballot watchers aided this, and there were notable correlations between over-voting and control of districts by drug families who supported the National Party.

The Alianza also suspects the possibility that the vote counts will be manipulated in some way at the level of the National Electoral Tribunal. The fear exists that software will somehow be open to corruption. One software vendor, owned by a National Party activist, was eliminated, but the lack of trust in the highest electoral authorities is palpable.

Sunday will mark a major turn in Honduran history. Either we will see the first re-election of a sitting president since the long dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías Andino ended in 1949; or we will see the election of the first president from a new party, formed in opposition to the political hegemony enjoyed by the Liberal and National Parties for most of the twentieth century, in between military dictatorships.

There will be international observers. How much they will see, how much they can watch, is questionable. The Alianza intends to have poll watchers at every electoral mesa, the local voting venues where votes are counted, the most likely place for false tallies to be introduced.

And we will be watching as well.