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.

Statistics and fraud

We now have two separate statistical analyses of Honduran presidential voting data, and both conclude the same thing: there was something fishy that happened in the middle of vote counting.

To recap: The Economist looked at the percentages of votes that went to the two main candidates before and after the long break by the TSE in posting vote counts.

Before the break, with about 57% of the vote counted, Salvador Nasralla had a 5% lead. After that, the lead steadily declined to the final apparent margin of just over 50,000 votes.

The Economist specifically asked whether the explanation offered by the Partido Nacional-- which claimed that the later votes came from more rural locations more likely to favor their candidate-- could account for the shift. They compared vote counts before and after the break in counting within each municipio.

Rather than being differences between urban and rural places, their analysis compared vote counts within each locality. They found an average shift of 3.8% within the same locality. It didn't matter if the municipio was rural or urban-- they all shifted the same way.

One known difference: votes tallied after the break included a large number that were not scanned and transmitted from the polling places on the day of the election. Instead, these were trucked up to Tegucigalpa and scanned there. Much of the discussion about vote counting has centered on the treatment of these vote tallies, including concerns about some arriving in open, unsecured packages, and the rumor that some were scanned in a hotel (and thus potentially could have had substitutes).

The Economist also drew attention to the unusually high voter turnout reported in the late-counted votes, in particular, from three largely rural departments. This, they note, could reflect a better get-out-the-vote operation-- or ballot box stuffing. Here it is worth remembering that the sign-off on vote tallies is done by credentialed party members, and there has been reported fraud and sale of credentials by smaller parties, in 2013 and 2017,

There matters stood until the release by the OAS today of a report by Georgetown University Professor Irfan Nooruddin. His analysis identifies a point when 68% of the votes were counted where, across different regions, both the turnout level and support for the Partido Nacional increases sharply. Either of these would be unusual; both are very unusual.

Nooruddin uses the reported data to do something that the actual vote counting never did: he simulates what vote counts would have looked like if results had posted randomly. This has been a key problem throughout the process: it is unclear what order the TSE used in its vote counting; it was not statistically random nor selected to be a representative sample. The OAS in its initial report noted that the TSE shifted from counting as votes came in to some unexplained selection process. Nooruddin helps us see if the election would have been less confusing if the voting tallies were counted randomly.

The conclusion of this part of the analysis is that if the votes were accurate, and were counted randomly, the pattern seen could have happened, and not result from tampering.

Nooruddin doesn't stop there-- as he notes, this part of the analysis is only worthwhile if the vote counts were accurate. He continues with tests of this assumption, and finds that the differences between early counted vote tallies and later ones "are large and suspicious".

Every department showed the same pattern of early lead for the Alianza followed by a change in pattern. As in the analysis by The Economist, the universality of this pattern is not easily explained by innocent factors. There is nothing about early vs. late vote tallies that would account for this.

It is as if there were two elections being counted, with precincts in every department changing the same way.

The only way we can imagine to have this result would be if for some reason the TSE did a preliminary sort of actas and deferred counting those most favorable to the National Party until last. Needless to say, that makes no sense.

Nooruddin points out that the shift in turnout in the later-counted tallies would be expected less than one in one thousand times-- statistically a significant difference. He presents an in-depth analysis of the Department of La Paz that shows that even in a department that favored Hernández throughout counting, and has a higher-than-average turnout rate, the later vote tallies increased in both reported turnout and voting for the Partido Nacional. The turnout increase is statistically likely to occur only one time in one thousand. Nooruddin concludes "such a sharp increase in turnout in the same department is unusual".

He writes that these findings are "consistent with a hypothesis of tampering with the vote tallies that were counted last".

So what could have happened?

One way to produce such an effect is good old fashioned ballot box stuffing-- reporting more votes than actually took place, and attributing the extra votes to a preferred candidate. Once the acta was signed, no one went back to double check the voter rolls or ballots. As long as the math on the tallies added up, you could have a voting pool in whatever form you like. This might well be correlated with places where votes weren't transmitted online the day of the election, as the ballot stuffing could happen at many points.

A lot of anxiety around these late vote tallies revolves around whether fake actas were substituted on the way to Tegucigalpa, or even fake images of actas in the TSE database. These, again, would work, and would not produce any contradiction unless the full ballot box was opened and recounted.

Both statistical analyses allow for the possibility this was just a really unusual way votes came in and were counted. But in Honduras, there is little trust in the system and unusual has already translated into illegitimate.

What happens next will determine whether Hondurans can begin to rebuild trust in democratic processes.

Controversy about votes being "monitored"

 UPDATED to add Santa Barbara and Cortes to list of departments where votes held for "monitoreo" favored the Alianza; and to note that the TSE has said it will count all votes, something we are seeing happen as we go through our list of tallies in monitoreo.

Today. reports from Honduras indicated that the Tribunal Supremo Electoral was holding about 300,000 uncounted votes in a state of "monitoreo". They offered no explanation why. What was expressed was that these votes would not be counted before a winner was named in the now extremely tight contest between Juan Orlando Hernández and Salvador Nasralla.

This alarmed international observers, who observed-- quite rightly-- that this many uncounted votes could well swing such a tight election. Both the OAS and the European Union publicly called on the TSE to count all the votes before designating a victor.

Remarkably, this call was echoed by COHEP, the Honduran council of private enterprise.

The EU in particular urged the TSE to take the time to count the votes, so that every vote was recognized, rather than hurry to end the election prematurely. UPDATE: as of 10 PM Tegucigalpa time, the TSE has said it will count all votes; and we are seeing the status change as we go through our list.

We decided to review the vote tallies that are being held for greater scrutiny-- or monitoreo-- ourselves, to see if the suspicion many have, that this includes a preponderance of pro-Alianza voting, was upheld.

It may take us a few hours. So far, though, in the Departments of Atlantida, Colon, Cortes, Santa Barbara, Valle and Yoro, the total of votes on these uncounted tallies for the Alianza is higher than the total for the National Party. (We are suspending this project at 1 AM Tegucigalpa time, as the TSE continues to update some of these. We will spot check other departments tomorrow...)

There may be reasons these tallies require extra scrutiny. There are check sum features built into the tallies, so errors in transcription or uncertainties about numerals can be resolved in many cases. In others, the question would be if, for example, over-writing on one line should result in ignoring the votes for other candidates.

So far, though, it is clear that this vote pool reserved from counting would contribute to shifting the margin back in the other direction.

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.

With 68% [updated] of the vote counted...

Alianza candidate Salvador Nasralla just held a press conference in which-- drawing on data that parties receive from the TSE-- 78% of the actas (reports of votes from individual districts) have been counted-- and they show him with almost a 5% lead over Juan Orlando Hernández.

NotiBomba has tweeted that the US Embassy is trying to persuade Hernández to concede (not clear what their source would be).

Meanwhile, the TSE itself maintains its silence.

UPDATE: Proceso Digital covered the Nasralla press conference. They quote what he said extensively; here's our translation:

"It's the first time in history that the Tribunal Supremo Electoral hasn't provided results [by the time he was speaking, midnight], but we have our own computing center and it says that with 68.4% of the actas, that is, 4,259,107 of the 6 million that the Tribunal said could vote, the actas are there”, said Nasralla.

He added that “of those that represent 68.4% of the actas, I have 45.4%, against 40.6% the the current president has, that's a difference of 4.8%, that represents 106,000 votes difference”.

Nasralla explained that two hours ago it said that there was a difference of 30,000 votes and that in the passing of the hours that progressed to 106,000.

“In light of the fact that this tendency has not changed, I can say to you that I am the new president of Honduras. I want to thank those that defended the vote”, he said.

The situation in Tegucigalpa

On Twitter, sources associated with the coalition Alianza are reporting that the Tribunal Supremo Electoral has cut off their access to vote counts. UPDATE: The TSE, on Twitter, says they have not cut off data provided to the parties.

The TSE has announced that they will be making a statement soon-- but the deadline has passed.

Meanwhile, Juan Orlando Hernández has declared himself the winner, based on exit polling.

He has mobilized the armed forces to guard the entry to the capital city and deployed them in the Tribunal Supremo Electoral center in Tegucigalpa. He has said he won't tolerate any protests.

The Honduran news source NotiBomba is reporting on Twitter numbers they say they received from the TSE that show the Alianza candidate, Salvador Nasralla, in the lead, with 44.5%, to Hernández 41.3%. They are not clear on when they received these numbers. We do not know how much of the vote has been counted, but the number of votes reported by this source-- 3 million-- implies about 50-60% of the vote has been counted.

Partial Official Results in

With 5,146 election table results counted (about 30%) the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) released the following vote counts:

Juan Orlando Hernandez     388,086
Salvador Nasralla               406,510

Both men have declared themselves the winner of the election.

The TSE will hold a press conference in 12 minutes.

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.

Nasralla Denied Entry to Congress

Mauricio Oliva rules the Honduran Congress with an iron hand.  His armed guards are omnipresent, and free access to Congressional proceedings is practically non-existent, even if you are an accredited reporter.  During voting sessions for the Supreme Court, his armed guards stand between the ballot box and the seated Congress members as they come up to cast their ballots.

Today his security guards detained the leader of the Partido Anticorrupción (PAC), Salvador Nasralla, from entering.  He sought to go in to find out if there would be a vote today on Supreme Court nominees (there wasn't).  He isn't a member of Congress, but he is the head of a political party that currently won't vote for the suite of candidates being put forward by the National and Liberal parties.

When Nasralla arrived this morning, as he has on many previous occasions, the guards prevented him entering while they checked with their supervisor to see whether or not to let him in.  Their supervisor, via walkie-talkie, told them he was not authorized to enter, so they detained him and questioned him as to his purpose for wanting to go in.

He had to call one of his party members who was a member of Congress, who then had to negotiate permission for Nasralla to come in.  To quote one of the articles, Virgilio Padilla, Congressman for the Department of Francisco Morazan and a member of PAC, literally "had to convince the head of security that the engineer (Nasralla) did not represent any danger."

Nasralla proposed today that PAC would accept the imposition of Rolando Argueta, currently the chief prosecutor, as Chief Justice, if Oliva would open up the voting to at least six of the candidates favored by PAC.

"We need 7 (justices) more, they want to place one who they say is Mr. Argueta because he will do what they want on extradition, but the other 6 should be from the list agreed to by PAC.  We've knocked around the list of 15 candidates that at least among them should be six that go there to defend the people."

Remember that the Nominating Committee submitted a list of 45 candidates that was split evenly between National and Liberal party affiliated candidates, plus one independent who was elected in the first round of voting.  Four of the six candidates that Nasralla proposes be voted on are National Party members.

But that deal isn't likely to go through.  So far Mauricio Oliva, the head of Congress, will only allow votes on the National Party's proposed slate of 7 candidates, because being rejected in three separate ballots isn't enough shame.

The next vote for Supreme Court nominees is currently scheduled for Tuesday, February 9.

"If" Makes All the Difference: Hernández on the Corruption Scandal

Honduras president: graft-linked companies helped fund my campaign

That's how Reuters titled their story, datelined Tegucigalpa today.

Which would be an incredible step forward in taking responsibility for the corruption scandal that has led to torchlit protests uniting supporters of two of the opposition parties in Honduras.

Unfortunately, the story appears to be slightly less than the headline promises. The basic points it reports are easy to summarize:

Facing a wave of protests calling for his resignation, Honduran President Juan Hernandez said on Wednesday that his 2013 presidential campaign took money from companies linked to one of the worst corruption scandals in the country's history.

But he said he and his National Party were unaware of where the money came from and hoped that an investigation would find and punish those responsible for breaking any laws.
...
Hernandez said the probe found 3 million lempiras (about $148,000) in campaign financing was tied to those companies, without giving more details.   

That would be considerably less funding channeled to the campaign than the $90 million that sources other than the PN have reported went to the party's coffers.

And while Hernández begrudgingly admitted some funds came to his campaign from the companies set up to loot the IHSS, he insisted he personally had nothing to do with it:

Hernandez told reporters that "me, myself, Juan Orlando, I have nothing to do" with the scandal.

Needless to say,  leaders of the protests against JOH were not placated. Salvador Nasralla of the Partido Anti-Corrupción underlined that corruption is corruption, saying:

"It's like saying that a thief who steals a little is less guilty than one who steals a lot".

The Honduran press, meanwhile, took quite a different tack in its coverage, leaving a much more ambiguous impression about what the president has or has not admitted.

El Heraldo's article was headlined "JOH: Partido Nacional should return funds to the IHSS", but the statement attributed to Hernández is conditional:

Hernández insisted that if it were proven that businesses connected to the embezzlement at IHSS issued checks in favor of the Partido Nacional, the funds should be returned...

That "if" disappeared in the Reuters story. But it, and similar hedged language, is all over Honduran reporting.

JOH, while seeming to call for his party to admit guilt, actually used the opportunity to undermine one of his political rivals, ex-mayor of Tegucigalpa Ricardo Alvarez, stating

"I am not the president of the party, but this was my suggestion more than eight months ago; I said that once the Fiscalía and the Judicial branch demonstrate that those resources came from something unseemly, the Partido Nacional is under an obligation to return those resources.

The head of the Partido Nacional who, this passage implies, did not take JOH's good advice, while unnamed in this article is Alvarez, who would have been likely to be the strongest candidate for president from the PN, before the Supreme Court decision allowing re-election.

In reporting by La Prensa, Hernández is quoted as explicitly saying "some of the checks were in the period when Ricardo Alvarez was president of the Party", continuing

"I don't know right now if he has given his statement or not, but everyone has to give a statement, everyone has to give his version and afterward, the court has to make its
finding".

It is no accident that El Heraldo ended its article with Hernández' response to a question about re-election:

In regard to my electoral participation, it seems to me that I should leave space for all political actors, but if they are in agreement, I have no problem in participating.

El Tiempo, reporting the response almost word for word as El Heraldo, added "Nonetheless, [Hernández] said that he had not spoken of re-election".

So-- no admission of guilt at all, contrary to what Reuters reported, is found in the Honduran coverage.  La Prensa de Honduras actually headlined its story  "I have nothing to do with the corruption of the Seguro": Juan Orlando Hernández.

Curiously absent from the Reuters story is what Hernández had to say about those protesting about the scandal. In Tiempo he is quoted as saying

"Why have the people come out? just like me, I was angered when I realized the depth of the problem, of the avarice of the human being who could act at the moment of being an administrator"..."I am certain that the majority of the people, like all of us, are angry about what has happened and many people legitimately come out and march, but also there are people who come out and march because they do not want other cases to be known ..."

So in JOH's view, he is on the side of the just protesters, while some others are nefariously participating in protests to prevent the disclosure of their own corruption, or for other, undisclosed, purposes, as El Heraldo quotes him saying

"It could be that some would like to use this movement for other purposes..."

And in case the innuendo is lost on readers, Proceso Digital ran its story under the headline Marchas tienen un componente legítimo pero tambíen intereses oscuros: Presidente Hernández. Where other Honduran media stopped quoting JOH's comments on the protests after he expressed his support for the "legitimate" outrage (in which he included himself), in Proceso Digital the statement took a more disturbing turn:

"but there is another group that is asking that I should not be in the government ever since I took office, the people that were against extradition, it is all one sequence, these are different sentiments, these are people that want to stop the fight against organized crime.

For JOH, protests against generalized "corruption" are fine, because he has nothing to do with it. But when the call is for him to step down-- well, that's quite another thing: you must be on the side of organized crime.

Reuters reported the part of Hernández statements that speaks to the over-arching narrative being constructed about corruption and protest in Central America, in which Guatemala and Honduras are merged. But each country has its own issues, and what gets left out from original coverage is where we find the traces of real politics.

It may be reassuring to suggest that the president of Honduras has admitted his party did something wrong, and has directed it be corrected. But that doesn't seem to actually be what has happened; holding himself above the fray, Juan Orlando Hernández minimized the depth of corruption, and managed to use the opportunity to continue to undermine political rivals within and outside his own party.

Protests, Claims of Conspiracy Against Juan Orlando Hernández

Juan Orlando Hernández, elected President of Honduras in November 2013 with about 37% of the popular vote, has ruled as if he had an electoral mandate.

For the last couple of weeks, however, things have been a little rougher in JOH's Honduras. Rough enough that English language media have taken notice.  

The International Business Times covered the story with a headline "Juan Orlando Hernandez Resignation Scandal", summarizing the issues concisely:

Hondurans demanded the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernandez Wednesday during demonstrations across the violence plagued capital city of Tegucigalpa. Protesters outside the National Congress questioned Hernandez's involvement in a social security scam involving some of the nation's most influential businesspeople and politicians...

The Honduran Institute of Social Security funding scam allegedly involved officials transferring large sums of money from the nation's federal coffers to the ruling National Party during the 2013 presidential elections.

The Tico Times adds that the Partido Nacional is accused

of having accepted approximately $90 million from IHSS to finance Hernández’s campaign in 2013, a cut of more than $300 million in diverted funds from the IHSS.

The investigation of corruption at the IHSS is ongoing. What has been alleged, citing the Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción, is that funds were paid to false-front businesses that provided no services. Some of these businesses then wrote checks to the central committee of the Partido Nacional, which used the proceeds to fund the presidential campaign, according to Salvador Nasralla, leader of the Partido Anti-Corrupción.

Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción (CNA

Leer más en: http://www.elheraldo.hn/pais/710497-214/entre-320-personas-se-repartieronel-multimillonario-desfalco-al-ihss
Síganos en: www.facebook.com/diarioelheraldo y @diarioelheraldo en Twitter

The allegation that a large part of the money diverted financed Hernández' presidential campaign has fueled demands that he step down.

Which leads to the strangest part of this story: the pushback, which has tried to recast this all as plotting to undermine the president, even to carry out a military coup.

As the IHSS scandal was unfolding Marvin Ponce, a former member of the Honduran Congress, and current advisor to the president, claimed that there was a "conspiracy" to spread rumors about JOH involving the US government:

I am glimpsing a dangerous thing. There is a high profile TV company in the country that has had meetings in the Department of State and with the Department of Justice. They have initiated a very strong campaign against the president. What we are seeing is that there is a campaign through two routes, David Romero [a prominent Honduran broadcaster] with accusations, and on the other side a strong strategy by other powerful sectors of the country to force him to yield and to avoid his seeking re-election."

Ponce's claims of US involvement are, to be charitable, questionable. They would require us to credit that preventing presidential re-election (recently authorized by the Honduran Supreme Court) is more important to US foreign policy than supporting a government doing precisely what the US calls for in security, immigration, and economic policy.

But even these claims do not hold a candle to other rumors about supposed plotting against JOH.

These came from Hugo Maldonado, the current head of Honduras' Human Rights Commission, who claimed that political opponents of the Honduran president were conspiring to remove him in a coup d'etat.

The ex-head of the Honduran Armed Forces, Romeo Vasquez Velasquez-- who actually was responsible for the execution of the 2009 Honduran coup-- denied the charge vigorously, and colorfully:

He shouldn't go making things up, unless my wife and I alone are going to carry out a coup d'Etat. I'm not in the Armed Forces-- who am I supposed to commit a coup with?

That wasn't the only reporting that waded into dubious waters.

The Honduran paper La Tribuna published an article-- really more like a political speech by a very enthusiastic supporter of the Partido Nacional-- on May 14. In between boasting about the strength of the PN and of JOH, it sketches out a supposed plot fueled by methamphetamine use, backdated to March, in which political advisors to José Manuel Zelaya supposedly outlined a campaign to undermine Hernández, amazingly, through public protests in May about corruption.

The conspiracy allegedly involved David Romero, and Salvador Nasralla of the Partido Anti-Corrupción as well, thus tidily blackening the reputations of all three.

The one thing in this lurid story that has some truth to it is that both PAC and LIBRE are calling for JOH to resign due to the IHSS scandal.

Meanwhile, the Tico Times estimated 5000 people took part in the latest march in Tegucigalpa, a night-time torchlit rally that was supported by both LIBRE and the Partido Anti-Corrupción.

Investigations of the IHSS continue; and for his part, JOH is trying to stay above the fray, while his party launches counter-accusations, smearing opponents and suing Salvador Nasralla for "defamation".

Re-Election a Done Deal

Former Presidents may now seek re-election in Honduras.

That is the effect of the Constitutional Branch decision having been published at 5 pm on Friday in La Gaceta, the official publication of the Honduran government.

How the publication of this decision happened is informative: someone fast-tracked the process.

As we previously noted, last Wednesday afternoon the Constitutional Branch debated and passed a resolution unanimously declaring that the portions of the Honduran constitution and penal code that prohibit re-election of Presidents were unconstitutional. All 5 justices signed that decision, which was then leaked to the press by someone employed by the court, an "official" leak. 

Overnight between Wednesday and Thursday the political clamor on both sides of the issue was intense.

Officially, only the National Party is in support of the decision, and it was a National Party ex-president and National Party Congressmen that had challenged the constitutional provision.

This fact becomes important when you realize that the Supreme Court, as constituted, was also selected while the National Party controlled the government, and that the Constitutional Branch contains current president Juan Orlando Hernández's hand picked candidates.  While president of Congress and campaigning for President, Hernández carried out a political purge of dubious legality, removing four of the five justices in the Constitutional Branch, replacing them with his own choices.  He has since replaced that fifth justice, promoting him to the position of Public Prosecutor.

The three other major parties-- the Liberal Party, Libre, and PAC-- have all come out against re-election.  After all, the post-hoc justification offered for the 2009 coup was that somehow through the opinion survey of the Cuarta Urna, Manuel Zelaya Rosales would be able to be re-elected.

Since joining Congress as a Libre Party member, Zelaya Rosales himself has come out against presidential re-election, as has the leader of PAC, Salvador Nasralla.

Thursday morning at 8 am, Justice Lizardo of the Constitutional Branch tried to rescind his signature on the decision.  Such an act, if upheld, would have made the decision not unanimous and would have forced the entire 15 justices of the court to hear the case and issue an opinion.  Lizardo based his recanting on the precarious legal theory that because the Constitutional Branch had not notified the legal representatives of the parties of a decision, he had room to act. This was where matters stood when we last blogged about this.

However, the Secretary of the Constitutional Branch chose to ignore Lizardo's letter notifying him of the change, and went ahead to disseminate the decision to the legal parties.

He also forwarded the decision to the Secretary of Congress, who then quickly forwarded it to ENAG, the government division that prints La Gaceta. Publishing congressional and executive decrees in La Gaceta is what puts them into effect.

The Honduran Congress and Supreme Court have a long-standing dispute about when judicial decisions are effective, with those opposed to some Supreme Court decisions refusing to publish them, to try to ignore them. The Honduran Congress has historically tried to assert control over the constitutional effects of Supreme Court decisions, normally reviews and can even publicly discuss decisions before deciding to forward them to ENAG for publication. No such review was allowed to happen this time, a decision taken by the National Party leaders of Congress.

Everyone agrees that once a judicial decision is published in La Gaceta it is in effect. Normally the publication process takes weeks. ENAG normally publishes things in the order they are received, and it usually has a large backlog of things to publish, so that bills can take a month or more to be published.

Yesterday at 5 pm this decision was officially published in La Gaceta. Someone clearly rushed this one into print.

The upshot: on Thursday Rafael Callejas, who brought the case, convened his campaign to regain the Presidency which he held as a National Party member from 1990 to 1994.

Permanent Parallel Police Forces?

Juan Orlando Hernandez would like to make the Policía Militar de Orden Público (PMOP) a permanent part of Honduras by modifying the Honduran constitution.  He seems to be having problems convincing anyone outside of his party that this is either necessary or a good idea.

In August, 2013 the Honduran Congress, led at that time by Juan Orlando Hernandez, passed a bill (decreto 168-2013) creating the PMOP as an added branch of the Honduran armed forces.  Their mission, as defined, is essentially the same as the National Police.   Rather than being Military Police, that is a police unit located in the military, policing military bases, they are a Militarized Police, soldiers policing the civilian population of Honduras.  The argument urging their creation was that they were needed because one could not have confidence in the National Police because so many of them were linked to organized crime or corrupt in other ways.  At the time the PMOP were created, it was going to take 5 years to review and vet the 12,000 National Police officers. 

Juan Orlando Hernandez now wants to make them permanent, called for from within the constitution, the same way the constitution mandates the existence of the Honduran Armed Forces.  This would make it harder for future legislators to dissolve the PMOP, because a constitutional amendment would require a 2/3 vote of Congress two years in a row.  Hernandez stated:

"For me its important that the Militarized Police be permanent, because today I am the President, but if tomorrow someone else comes along and for ideological reasons dissolves the Militarized Police, we will fall back into the pothole that we all suffered; the Honduran people are not mistaken, if you ask the people who know the subject of security, in which they live all their days, they will tell you of the enormous support that the Militarized Police have."

Hernandez has portrayed opposition to this as either being unmotivated, or linked to support for the drug traffickers.  But Hernandez faces a lot of opposition on this issue.

There's never been a unified opposition in Honduras, especially not since the 2009 coup, but on this issue the political parties not in power, PAC, Libre, PINU, and the Liberals, have all stated their opposition to this move.  Its not that they're against the PMOP, they all have emphasized, its that they are against there existing two parallel police forces in Honduras with the same mission.  Mauricio Villeda, who was the Liberal Party's Presidential candidate in the last election, argues that the PMOP does not need to be added to the Honduran constitution, that as part of the Military it already has all the status it needs.  Villeda pointed out that creating a mandate for the PMOP within the constitution would be like creating a second armed forces, equal to the existing armed forces.  He suggested that this move has more to do with Hernandez wanting to continue in power after his term runs out.

Manuel Zelaya (@manuelzr), leader of Libre, responded on Twitter:

"We are not opposed to the PMOP; yes to them having a parallel mission"

Salvador Nasralla, leader of PAC responded on his TV program saying:

"The Armed Forces are already in the constitution which clearly establishes their obligations, PAC is not against the Militarized Police who should work until the problem of insecurity in this country is resolved.  We are against including [the PMOP] in the constitution and that they convert into a branch loyal to the President to defend him in his eager desire to continue in power clearly expressed in all the media."

The opposition has said it would welcome Hernandez putting this measure to a public referendum, as Hernandez said he might do if Congress fails to act.

The National Party is completely behind Hernandez, but lacks sufficient members in Congress to make this happen without some participation by those in other parties. Oscar Alvarez, head of the National Party caucus in Congress, claimed on Sunday that they had 80 solid votes for the change.  Since there are only 76 National Party members in Congress, that must mean he's managed to convince 4 members of the opposition to vote with them.  However, this bill needs 86 votes to pass to become law.

The current Congress has until January 24, when their session ends, to act.

Congressional Maneuvers

On the same day on which the National Party Congressional delegation announced it will let Juan Orlando Hernandez choose its Congressional leadership, the Congressional delegations of the Anti-Corruption Party, LIBRE, and PINU signed an accord to work together on certain projects in Congress.

Wilmer Velasquez, a National Party Member elected to Congress in November, told the Honduran press that the National Party Congressional Delegation had met and decided to let Juan Orlando Hernandez select its candidates for Congressional leadership. 

This is supposed to be a sign of unity, though he admitted there were several names being floated for president of Congress.  Velasquez told the press that Hernandez was in the best position to choose who was best for Honduras. 

Any nominees will still have to gain a majority of the votes of all Congress members.

At the same time, the Congressional delegations of the Partido Anticorrupción  (PAC), Libertad y Refundacion (LIBRE), and Partido Innovación y Unidad (PINU) came to a meeting organized by PAC's presidential candidate, Salvador Nasralla, and agreed to work together to achieve certain goals.  The full pact can be read here.

Election law changes are one of these goals. The allied parties will seek to mandate electronic voting to disrupt the traditional forms of election fraud. 

Also among the agreed-upon goals:

• a rollback of the tax package the current Congress just put into effect
• try to regulate the salaries of government employees 
• work to democratize the Congressional rules and reform the election law
• an overhaul the anti-corruption law

This does not mean they will always be working as a bloc with a combined roster of 51 members of Congress, but that they will work together on the specific issues agreed upon.  

Notably missing from either announcement was the Liberal Party, which declined to participate in the PAC sponsored meeting. 

Yani Rosenthal, current head of the Liberal Party Congressional Delegation (until January 20) said the party was between a rock and a hard place.  He faulted internal party decisions for the Liberal Party not having a clear position on the new Congressional leadership, citing Mauricio Villeda's call ordering Liberal Party Congressional Delegates not to participate in Congressional leadership discussions. 

Villeda's order came after twelve party members had held conversations with Juan Orlando Hernandez on the topic.  Rosenthal said that there were problems for the party no matter what it does.  If they ally with the National Party in Congress, for many that would be a death knell for the party.  An alliance that includes LIBRE would mean joining with a party that damaged the Liberal Party.  Another possibility would be to not ally with any party, but according to Rosenthal that, like all the other possibilities, would mean rejecting some of the current party values in order to maintain viability as a political party. 

Separately, Manuel Zelaya Rosales announced he was stepping down as coordinator of LIBRE as part of the separation of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia and LIBRE.  He has occupied this office since July 2010.  Zelaya will remain part of the Frente, and is part of LIBRE's new Congressional Delegation.

All of these moves are crystallizing the new political landscape in Honduras, against a background of furious legislative action by the current, National-party dominated, lame-duck congress, intended to give Juan Orlando Hernández as much as possible before he faces a Congress that will not automatically do what he wants.

The New Political Landscape in Honduras

On Friday, La Prensa connected the dots on the new Congress, quoting statements from Xiomara Castro that suggest LIBRE party leadership is (while pursuing complaints of irregularities and inconsistencies in the official vote count) moving on to the next stage: functioning as a major opposition party in a new, multi-party political landscape.

Castro... pointed out that LIBRE has converted itself into an "important political force" by the number of congress-members that it gained in the unicameral Congress, made up of 128 members.

"We broke the chains of two-party rule, today we are located in the first place, today we have demonstrated that the people fought and will fight for the platform of LIBRE".

As previously noted, the Partido Nacional is projected to have 47 congress members; Libre will have 39; the Partido Liberal will have 26; and Salvador Nasralla's Partido Anticorrupción is expected to have 13 congress members, with the final three falling, one each, to the long-established smaller parties: PINU, the Christian Democrats, and the Partido de Unificación Democrática.

La Prensa adds a contrast with the existing congress that is worth quoting: 

In the present Congress, presided over and absolutely controlled by Hernández, the Partido Nacional has 71 diputados, the Partido Liberal 55, and the other three minority parties shared 12 seats, which had given total control to the conservative binomial that has governed this country for more than a century.

La Prensa is clearly anticipating less total control over the incoming government. That leads us to consider possibilities. LIBRE/PN coalitions seem unlikely (although some press reports earlier this week contained speculation about such an alliance).

We note with interest the opinion of Raúl Pineda Alvarado:

“The ideal is if there exists an agreement with all the political parties, but in any case the natural alliance that the nacionalistas could make is with the Partido Liberal”.

Pineda Alvarado is an ex-congress member for the Partido Nacional. So his comments give us insight into the pragmatic approach we might expect from within his party. His views are echoed by a re-elected Partido Nacional congress member, Antonio Rivera Callejas, who says that the PN could make alliances with the more "democratic" part of the Partido Liberal.

Rivera alludes to the marked division between the present day Liberal congess members, some of whom have stayed in line with the presidential candidate, Mauricio Villeda, and the other that has had more affinity with LIBRE. In the case of the first 26 virtually elected congress members, many of them re-elected, all belong to the first group, that is to say, they are "villedistas”.

Thus, we can expect an attempt to form a coalition of the two traditional parties on one side, with a possible 73 votes giving it a majority in Congress. Partido Nacional commentators add the three single representatives of the small parties, projecting 76 votes.

But that presumes that the entire Liberal party delegation does not see advantage in using its seats more flexibly, to advance its own political projects.

Earlier today, La Prensa suggested that the Partido Anti-Corrupción will form an alliance with LIBRE, in opposition to the two major parties. Despite ideological differences, both parties were mainly motivated by rejection of the existing power structure, which both characterized as fundamentally corrupt. Quoting PAC member (and projected congress member) Virgilio Padilla, La Prensa wrote

We believe that the opposition has to plan a block that can oppose the officialism of the government, and that can only be an alliance constructed with the Partido Liberal, Libre and PAC... We are disposed to establish an alliance that will defend Honduras, an alliance that represents the interests of Honduras, an alliance that will impede intervention in the Judicial Branch, because if the Partido Nacional is going to control all the powers of State, impunity is going to continue.

Salvador Nasralla, the presidential candidate, is said not to have ruled out any alliance, but La Prensa concludes alliance with the Partido Nacional is unlikely.

A three-way alliance would give LIBRE-PAC-Partido Liberal control of congress with 78 votes.

LIBRE and PAC alone would not be able to form a majority, with 52 votes. But they could make it much less simple for the Partido Nacional to pass its legislative agenda, even if they did not have formal support from the Partido Liberal.

Which more or less means that the husk of the Liberal Party, presided over by Mauricio Villeda, may have more power as a losing party than Villeda would have had if elected president with a minority of the national vote.

Can it be true that Nasralla is winning Cortés?

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).

Exit polls and partial vote counts

As promised, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral broadcast some official results at 9 PM Sunday.

Their summary, with only 24% of the vote counted: 34% Juan Orlando Hernández, 28% Xiomara Castro, 20% Mauricio Villeda, 15% Salvador Nasrallah.

The margin dividing the two top candidates is quite small: 249,660 to 202,501-- so less than 50,000 votes separate LIBRE and the Partido Nacional. The eligible electorate is 5.3 million.

Does this tell us who will win? no, it does not. We do not know which results are included; there is no way to project from likely voting patterns in areas already counted to other similar areas.

Long before the TSE broadcast these partial counts, the Honduran press owned by supporters of Hernández was calling the election for him, based on exit polling by Ingenieria Gerencial. This is the same firm that did polling for the Partido Nacional, those private polls that were alluded to during the campaign but never published.

Meanwhile, LIBRE, relying on other exit polls, saw its candidate emerging as the winner. Without a newspaper ready to declare Xiomara Castro the winner, this would only matter if you were someone (like us) who expects exit polls in Honduras to be inherently unreliable-- and thus expect contradictory results.

Before the TSE circulated their preliminary counts, Xiomara Castro announced that she has been elected; on twitter, the statement read

Con los resultados que he recibido de boca de urna de todo el país, puedo decirles: Soy la Presidenta de Honduras. [With the results that I have received from the edge of the ballotbox from throughout the country, I can say to you: I am the President of Honduras.]

This at least should serve to prevent all the Honduran press from prematurely calling the election for Hernández. Of course, it also has opened Castro up to critique from pundits nationally and internationally.

Meanwhile, Bloggings by Boz tweeted

I analyzed the exit poll data with an adjusted turnout model and got 31.5% to 31% in favor of Hernandez, well within any margin of error.

Except for the absolute number (we were kicking around 34-35% in discussions internally) that sounds about right to us: two diametrically opposed candidates separated by a threadbare margin. Not 6%-- this election should turn on 1-2% of the final vote count.

September Poll from Paradigma is out

Paradigma has now published its September polling, and it will come as no surprise: the race is a dead heat between LIBRE and the Partido Nacional. With the margin of error at +/- 2%, Xiomara Castro registers support from 22.8% of those intending to vote; Juan Orlando Hernández stands at 21.9%.

Paradigma concludes their short summary of the election outlook with the statement that

the undecideds continue to be the determining factor for next 24 of November.

That storyline, though, seems less clear when we look at their own data. If we interpret "indecisos" as meant to correspond to the category marked NS/NR in their poll-- which means declined to state/no response-- then in the most recent period, they have settled down at around 11%, up one percent (e.g. within the margin of error) since the previous poll. The big movement there seems to be over; from August to September this category contracted, declining 7%. Yes, the remaining NS/NR could swing the election if they all, or most of them, went for one of the two leading candidates. But when we look at how the 7% decided between July and now, assuming they went for one of the two leading candidates, then we can see that they are splitting fairly evenly: from July to August Castro and Hernández both gained about 3%; Hernández added an additional 2% and Castro registered almost even from August to September, but these fluctuations are within the margin of error.

We still think the election is going to be decided by voters for the Partido Liberal and Anti-Corruption Party: if they stick with their sinking ships, then it is anyone's guess what will happen. But if significant numbers of supporters of either Mauricio Villeda or Salvador Nasralla defect systematically to the leading candidate closest to their own interests, they could change the race completely.

The other notable thing about the new Paradigma poll: for the first time since April, "none of the above" is no longer clearly in the lead. At 21.3%, this third option is also in a statistical tie with Castro and Hernández. That's 6% of voters who have decided between August and September to settle on one of the existing candidates.

Overally, the beneficiaries of movement in the poll are the two traditional parties, the Partido Nacional up 2%, and the Partido Liberal up 2.6%. That may be comforting for those in the traditional power structure who equate any challenge to the two-party dominance of Honduran politics with anarchy. So it is worth underlining how unusual this picture actually is: despite moving up in the polls, the Partido Nacional is just tied with an entirely new party, one that has seen Honduran media working hard to demonize it.

The actual end game here is likely to come down to how the voting process is managed. But whichever party wins this election, the old system is gone.