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.

New numbers quietly added to the TSE website

At 4:17, a tweet from TSE head David Matamoros caused a slight ripple of concern; he said "There are still 7500 summaries of polling places to scrutinize, that represent some 2 million votes":

“Nos faltan unas 7,500 actas por escrutar que representan unos dos millones de votos y por eso se avanzará en los resultados en la medida que se vayan recibiendo".

If there actually were another 2 million votes to count, election results might be open to considerable change. After all, as of the TSE's 2 AM press briefing, they had only counted about 1.99 million votes. So that would mean there were more votes not yet counted than already included. But in fact, the TSE has affirmed that 59% of the votes have been counted.

So what is happening here? Let's try explaining, using the numbers from the TSE site, which by 7 PM tonight reflected additional counting.

In the following table,  we list the total votes counted in the more than 10,500 actas (results from individual polling places) reviewed so far. These polling places had a total of 3.6 million possible voters; 2.02 million votes were actually reported, for a participation rate of 58% (suggesting this election is a normal one for Honduras).

	Votes (millions)	Registered voters (millions)	actas	Participation rate
counted	2.020682	3.617484	10,503	58%
uncounted	unknown	2.429389	7,625	unknown
Total electorate	unknown	6.046873	18,128

Until those remaining actas are counted, no one knows what the number of votes there will be; Matamoros is referring to the number of potential voters. To reach 2 million votes out of the remaining 2.4 million registered voters would require over-voting of 83%. While (apparently fraudulent) over voting was one of the tactics used in the last election, it did not take place on such a massive scale. There is no reason to think that the remaining actas somehow include a higher proportion of motivated voters than those already counted, from the cities, where get out the vote campaigns took place.

So let's assume Matamoros meant only that there were 2 million registered voters whose chance to vote is included in the actas still to be counted. He doesn't want to disenfranchise them with a premature conclusion.

What might we expect when these votes actually are counted?

The TSE website as of 7 PM Monday presents new numbers, compared to the 2 AM baseline. They show Nasralla and Hernández both gaining votes, with Nasralla adding 2,000 votes to his lead.

Because so much of the vote has already been counted, even though the TSE added 30,000 votes overall, the percentages of each of the two leading candidates remained the same.

Here's those numbers:

	votes	vote share	change from 2 AM
Nasralla	868,473	45%	up 13,000
Hernández	772,458	40%	up 11,000

Unless there is a drastic increase in the proportion of registered voters exercising their rights to vote in the outstanding districts, most of which are in rural areas, we will expect about the same proportion of voting (currently 58%). This would add not 2 million, but 1.4 million more votes-- for a total electorate of 3.4 million, which is what we were projecting informally, based on our knowledge of previous elections.

	Votes (millions)	Registered voters (millions)	actas	Participation rate
counted	2.020682	3.617484	10,503	58%
Uncounted projected	1.409045	2.429389	7,625	58%
Total electorate	3.429727	6.046873	18,128

Could the so-far uncounted voters have a different profile than seen to date? Sure-- but here, remember how Marco Ramiro Lobo defended the late hour of the first official results from the TSE: they waited until repeated counting of actas wasn't changing the margin of 5% between the candidates.

The TSE doesn't expect a change. The numbers will go up; but to erase a lead of almost 100,000 votes, there would have to be very unusual voting patterns.

Where the Recount Process Stands

Readers of English language media may have seen stories quoting a  press release from the Tribunal Supremo Electoral claiming that LIBRE failed to follow through yesterday on an agreement about starting the review of the Actas in the disputed presidential election.

But just reporting the TSE's press release is neither the whole story, nor is it accurate.

You are unlikely to have seen any reporting on LIBRE's response to the TSE press release, which is that David Matamoros, head of the TSE, was mistaken when he said the process of recounting the votes would begin yesterday, because there has been no agreement as to the procedures to be used for the process.

According to Matamoros, the process of rescanning the original tally sheets (Actas) to compare them with the scanned images in the TSE election counting system and contrast them with the certified versions of the Actas under LIBRE party control was supposed to begin yesterday. 

But in this procedure, there's no mechanism for a recount or handling suspected errors, only comparing versions of the Actas.  Nor was there a procedure for handling the 2000+ actas for which there are no scanned images, but for which the TSE has recorded vote counts.

Oscar Rivera, the elections overseer for LIBRE, told Proceso Digital that LIBRE indeed met with the TSE on Tuesday to arrange for the recount.  The TSE representatives presented a proposal for the way to proceed with the recount, but said if LIBRE was not in agreement, for them to propose an alternative. 

Rivera said

We received the proposal and the same night (Tuesday evening) we gave a formal reply to the Tribunal in which we asked for other mechanisms to assure the Honduran people that Honduran democracy would be respected and that the TSE was a serious [professional] organization, but with the reply that they gave us, they haven't convinced us.

Enrique Reina, campaign coordinator for Xiomara Castro, added

They haven't said what they will do when an Acta contains anomalies and we asked that if an Acta is inconsistent in some way, that they recount the votes [in that ballot box].

Oscar Rivera went on to note that there were other mechanisms that LIBRE could use in the election law to get the Actas validated.  He noted that they were awaiting a formal reply from the TSE magistrates that addressed their request of December 2, not the unilateral approach presented by the TSE in their press release.

So, for the moment, a recount is in a holding pattern while the TSE and LIBRE negotiate a process acceptable to both.

There's Going To Be a Recount (Of Sorts)

This morning Xiomara Castro and the LIBRE Party filed a formal set of complaints about the vote counting process and its lack of transparency, documenting errors and discrepancies in the formal counting of the tally sheets of the over 16,000 Mesas Electorales Receptoras (MER). 

LIBRE representative Ricki Moncada then read the document to the assembled press.

The Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) head David Matamoros agreed to a public recount of the Actas: not the votes themselves, just a recount of the votes as recorded on the tally sheets.

This, of course, is a compromise.  Ballot boxes will not be re-opened; individual votes will not be recounted. 

It's a vexing compromise because some of the problems that LIBRE alleges include alteration of the Actas themselves, which they say they can document. 

Remember that the election procedures gave the political parties a number of ways to get copies of the scanned/reported Acta at each step.  The party representative at every MER was supposed to be given a copy of the scanned Acta to take back to the party. Once the scanned Acta hit the TSE's computers, a copy was supposed to be sent to each party, and to the foreign vote auditors.

LIBRE says it has Actas sent to them by the TSE with scan dates of the early morning hours of the election day, bearing data that looks like the test data used to validate the system in earlier runs.  LIBRE also says they have copies of Actas that don't match the Acta image in the TSE central computing database, with different signatures and vote tallys.

Since the election itself on November 24, there has been a public recount of the scanned actas going on at this site:  http://conteo.votosocial.org.  In addition, there has been a Facebook-coordinated effort to identify Actas that contain problematic information or were mis-recorded in the TSE's vote counting system. 

Through these independent projects, more than 1600 problematic Actas had been identified by Saturday, November 30.

There is a further 2000+ Actas which the TSE has "sequestered" because of unspecified problems, for which vote counts, and images, have not been released.  Then there are a series of MERs for which vote totals are recorded, but no Acta image is posted.

I have been involved in the public recount of the Actas, entering the values from the scanned images of the Actas into a system that then recounts the votes once 3 separate reviews of the transcription agree that the data are correct. I also have reviewed Actas flagged on the Facebook page as problematic.  I can say first-hand that I found inconsistencies in more than 500 Actas I've reviewed over the last week. 

Some of the inconsistencies were transcription errors: the TSE had an enormous problem going from the hand-written numbers to recording those numbers in their MS-SQL database.  Over time, the TSE seemed to be correcting these transcription errors, though in a non-transparent fashion since they never acknowledged a single one of them.  Many still remained as of this past Saturday.

More troubling, though, is that the vote totals on far too many Actas added up to more than the number of people who were reported to have voted in that particular MER. 

Each Acta contains a field "Ciudadanos que votaron", which the TSE training manual documented as being calculated by taking the total number of ballots at the start of voting, and subtracting the number of blank ballots remaining at the end of voting.  The starting number of ballots and the calculated "Ciudadanos que votaron" are recorded on the official tally sheet.  The total number of votes being reported on the tally sheet should add up to the number of "Cuidadanos que votaron" but very frequently it does not. Based on my experience of trying to review the results, minor errors of 1, 2, and 3 over-votes are common, while over-votes of 50 or more happen less often. 

Reviewing and recounting the Actas alone will not correct these over-votes.  They merely become  enshrined in the result.

The public vote count shows results that differ from the TSE count, though not enough to change the outcome of the election.  But there are still 4.4% of the Actas which cannot be validated because the TSE released no image of them. This is enough to affect the margin between the two leading candidates, which might reflect the tighter race that most observers expected.

Then there's the issue of database security.  Anonymous Honduras has twice penetrated the vote counting center, and currently (late afternoon on December 2) has replaced the TSE's main web page with their own.  Their penetration made it clear they could have easily, and invisibly, changed the results in favor of any candidate they wanted to.  From details like their ability to show administrative tables, it seems that they had complete control over the database, and the TSE was apparently none the wiser.

So, there will be some sort of a recount of the Actas, with representatives of the political parties present to agree that the data entered into the system is what is on the Acta. The TSE has no idea what the procedures will be, or how they will do this, but something will happen. 

It's a step in the direction of transparency. But not the kind of recount that would put to rest, ultimately, the kinds of doubts that have been raised.

"The image of openness"? Election Observers Harassed

The normally open borders of Honduras with its neighbors are only partly open this week.  Venacio Cervantes, head of Immigration,  said yesterday that the borders are open, but that foreigners must justify their trip into Honduras at this time.  "All entrances will be controlled," said the retired General.

Actually, he said a lot more:  "All hotheads and national and foreign agitators who promote boycotting the election will be neutralized".

Today, he was ordered by Porfirio Lobo Sosa to stop, after two separate incidents of harassment of foreign election observers were reported by domestic and foreign press.

Cervantes reportedly said that he was

not going to permit disorder from [those] that come to slow down the electoral process, and those hotheads who want to protest and make unrest and confusion;  the armed forces will proceed in accordance with all that's legal and we shall be forceful in the application of the law.

Unfortunately, the "hotheads" he thought would be slowing the electoral process included duly accredited election observers-- on whom any hope of this election being seen as transparent rests.

The earliest incident happened Friday, Nov. 22.  ERIC, the Equipo de Reflexión Investigación y Comunicación, a Jesuit organization long established in Honduras, had its offices in El Progresso, Yoro, raided by Immigration police from the town. They entered a room where over 100 foreign election observers had just finished receiving training from a Tribunal Supremo Electoral official, and demanded that the Guatemalans, Salvadorans, US Citizens, and Canadians that made up the group present their TSE accreditation documents.

They also ordered the leader of the group, Alexis Lanza, to bring everyone down to the nearest Immigration office for unstated reasons.

Honduran Immigration police have no authority to enforce the election law, nor have they been formally asked to do so by the TSE.  They have no legal power to ask for a foreign election observer's TSE accreditation documents. The only thing they can legally ask someone to produce is their passport or other immigration documents that identify them and authorize them to be in the country.

Then on Saturday, November 23, military police entered the Aurora Hotel in Tegucigalpa, and ordered everyone in the hotel to leave their rooms, interrupting a meeting of LIBRE activist Eduardo Enrique Reina with his duly assigned and accredited foreign election observers.  All were asked to identify themselves and were threatened with explusion from the country.

That was too much for David Matamoros, president of the TSE, who ordered Immigration to stop following and harassing foreigners, saying

They told me they were following two people who had entered the country 10 days ago, but at this moment we cannot have any discussion of the act of going to a place where we have invited foreigners, because we must maintain the image of openness, the image of peace and tranquility which we want to have, not only for the Hondurans, but also for the international observers.

Matamoros says he went directly to President Lobo Sosa to ask that Immigration, which is part of the executive branch, be ordered to cease its operations following foreigners in the country.  Matamoros also issued instructions to the police and Armed Forces pointing out that they, in support of the election, were supposed to protect, not harass, election observers.

Anything to preserve the image of openness and tranquility.