Making Sure? Votes Count

For the last few weeks of the Honduran election, no surveys of the electorate can be published. But really, the only poll that matters will take place this coming Sunday, November 24. According to the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, 5.3 million Hondurans are eligible to vote.

Throughout the country, people in five thousand election centers will place their ballots for president, congress, and municipal mayor in three separate ballot boxes.

What happens then? What ensures that the ballot cast is counted and reported accurately? How reliable should we expect the numbers to be? In part, what you think the answer is depends on how you assess the procedures set in place by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral.

Each individual ballot for president has a Mesa Electoral Receptora number, the name of the voting center, and the department printed on it.  Each of these ballots also has a unique number, with the name of the municipio preprinted on it.

The Presidential Ballot looks like this:

Each Mesa Electoral Receptora has a custodian. In previous elections the churches, through the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church Association, supplied the custodians. Most of the custodians this time around are students from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH).

Each Mesa Electoral Receptora has one representative, and an alternate, from each political party.  Each has a president, secretary, watcher, and members, all appointed to office by the TSE. All procedural votes are by simple majority, with the president of the Mesa abstaining unless there is a tie.

The charge to the MER technical custodians is

• to make sure there is adequate access by voters from the starting hour to the ending hour of voting.
• to observe the rights of the citizens
• to maintain order in the voting centers
• to be yourself transparent and responsible, absent of any authoritarianism.
• to respect the popular will when counting the votes and inscribing the results on the tally sheet
• to return the voting boxes with the tally sheets to the TSE.

Those tally sheets are key to linking the count made at the Mesa and the outcome the TSE reports.

A separate manual for each department of Honduras has detailed instructions including how to count and record the votes from each of the ballot boxes. Observers, both national and international,  may be present but must not reveal any results nor advocate for any candidate. The members of each Mesa fill out and sign an opening form that records how many ballots they have for each office (in numbers and written out in words).

To prevent voters selling their vote, cell phones and cameras are newly banned from voting booths. The voter is given a ballot for the presidential vote, congress, and municipal mayoral election, signed on the back by members of the Mesa. The voter folds each of the three ballots in half to obscure their vote, then brings them back to the Mesa where members verify they have the required signatures on the back.

Counting of the votes begins with checking the ballot for the required signatures and stamp, then the voter's markings are evaluated. Each ballot has a photo of the candidate, the party flag, and a space to mark the vote. But a mark anywhere on the candidate or the flag counts, as long as most of the mark is in the space of a single candidate.

Vote counting is done in public. Anyone can watch, but must remain silent. 

First the President takes an inventory of the leftover supplies, stamps each as "left over" and records the counts on the Accounting form. The president then hands the sealed ballot box to the Examiner who opens it and extracts a vote.

The examiner qualifies the vote as valid, null, or blank and indicates to which party (if valid) it belongs.  It is shown to the members of the Mesa, then passed to the President, who ratifies it. The secretary records it on the appropriate tally sheet with a tick mark for the party, null, or blank.

The president sorts ballots into piles by party, null, or blank, then gives each pile to the Secretary who seals them in plastic bags and puts them back in the voting place briefcase.  Once all the votes are counted, the Secretary fills out the vote count section for each candidate as well as tallying the number of citizens, and Mesa members, who voted.  This, along with the annotation of the number of blank ballots received, plus those left over, finalizes the form.  The numbers are then transferred to the Closing Tally form which is signed by the Mesa members.

Getting the vote tallies to the TSE in Tegucigalpa has been a point of potential weakness in the whole process. In 2009, the tallies were read over cell phones, and entered into the computer in Tegucigalpa based on the phoned-in counts. The results were, to be charitable, incredibly inaccurate.

This year, the TSE is trying a new approach, used successfully in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Completed Closing Forms for president, congress, and the municipal election will be scanned, and sent to the TSE either through a wired internet connection or through a wireless modem across the cell phone network. 

500 voting centers lack electricity or an internet connection, so those votes will not be counted until opened more than a week later in Tegucigalpa. 

In addition to scanning and transmitting the Closing Form, each custodian will print out a copy for the representative of each political party, and for any member of the Mesa that desires a copy.  Once sent, the original Closing Form will be stamped by the custodian with a stamp indicating it has been transmitted (all copies will be stamped).

The president of the Mesa will then aggregate all the oficial forms into an envelope to close out the polling place.  All papers will be returned to the briefcase, sealed for return to the TSE.

In the past, the TSE then recounted every ballot box, and entered the data into a new computer file. The TSE has said it will not announce results the night of the election, only "trends". Meanwhile, Hagamos Democracía, an NGO that produced exit polling that was more accurate than the TSE in 2009, will be operating again this year.

A fairly fragile system for such a consequential election.

Political Pragmatism?

It was surreal to read an Agence France-Presse interview with Adolfo Facussé, one of the vocal supporters of the coup against Manuel Zelaya Rosales in 2009, saying Xiomara Castro could represent real change in Honduras, whereas none of the other candidates does.

Facussé, who is president of the Asociación Nacional de Industriales (ANDI), said:

We have businessmen from all the parties.  Libre has something that appeals to me and that is the promise of change. The country definitely needs to change.

How exactly the nation needs to change is pretty clear: Facussé went on to characterize the Lobo Sosa government, and especially its economic policies, as a disaster.  Of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the National Party candidate for President, Facussé said "he has the characteristics to become an autocratic president."

Aline Flores, president of the other leading business group in Honduras, Consejo Hondureño de la Empresa Privada (Cohep), made it clear she didn't agree with Facussé about LIBRE.  She said:

He (Facussé) has always had his own opinion and I respect him a lot, but we don't share some ideas.

Facussé did get support in his criticism of the Lobo Sosa government. Oscar Galeano, a former president of COHEP, said

Some businessmen will prefer the right, some the center, and others the left.  What is certain is that Honduras cannot continue depending on irresponsible governments that don't promote investment and development, because (with Lobo), we have lost much time; we have a high rate of unemployment.

Facussé said he was not afraid of leftist ideas, though he's not enchanted with Castro's call for a Constitutional Assembly:

I'm not afraid of the ideas of the left, the intelligent left (....) they have not done badly in El Salvador; in Nicaragua the businessmen are content.  We, without having a leftist government, have an idiotic government.  For businessmen it is not good to have a populace dying of hunger, poor people.

That seems to fly in the face of Facussé's support for the 2009 coup, but he clearly thinks that political intervention made a point that will limit what even a LIBRE president does:

If Doña Xiomara is elected, Don Mel Zelaya will have the intelligence to manage things [the government] without confronting the rest of society.

It is shocking to see a Honduran businessman call the government "idiotic". But increasing social inequality, impoverishing the populace, is exactly what the last two National Party presidencies have done.

A recent study by The Center for Economic Policy Research , "Honduras Since the Coup: Economic and Social Outcomes", authored by Jake Johnston and Stephan Lefebvre, points out that

Economic inequality, which decreased for four consecutive years starting in 2006, began trending upward in 2010. Honduras now has the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America.

Only three countries in Latin America have seen their GINI coefficient, a measure of how unequal the distribution of income is in the country, increase since 2009.  The rest have seen decreases of 1 to 7 percent.  Honduras had a 12.5% increase in its GINI coefficient, from .50 in 2009, to .59 in 2011, the latest year for which there are records.  That's the greatest increase of any country in Latin America, and the highest absolute value for a GINI coefficient in Latin America.

In fact, since 2001, inequality has consistently increased under Nationalist governments, declining only during the four years of the Zelaya administration. Under Zelaya, Honduras had about the same level of economic inequality as Costa Rica in 2009.

And as the Honduran businessmen speaking out note, poverty is bad for business. The rich may get richer while the poor get poorer, but eventually, you run out of customers.

REVISED: Another American Drug Plane Down in Honduras

Update: Our post (below) is based on Honduran news reports. A comment from MJZ (published below) calls into question the registration reported by the Honduran press. Also relevant is the comment by Kevin Porter who called into question the identification. We have removed the specific details about the registration identification made in the Honduran press. This does not mean that the general point we are making-- that older US planes are often making their way to Honduras in an afterlife as highly disposable drug planes-- is any different; simply that in this case, we do not know the registration, and cannot verify the origin of this plane.

Another American plane loaded with narcotics landed in Honduras yesterday.  The plane landed near Limones at a dirt landing strip on someone's farm, a strip the owner reportedly thought he had disabled.  It landed at night, with the strip lighted by a generator, and unloaded its drugs into waiting pickup trucks.  The plane was then burned.

Sources differ about the registration of the plane.  International sources, like Terra.com, report the plane was Venezuelan, while El Heraldo and others report it to be American. [Deleted information from Honduran news reports that has been contested.]

[Deleted discussion based on Honduran reports of registration.]

It was unusual that the Honduran military were not notified of this flight by the US radar operators from the Southern Command in Tampa, Fl. or by the US radar operators in Puerto Castillo.  Under a joint agreement the US supplies radar sightings to the Honduran military, who then try to intercept and interdict the plane.  This service was briefly interrupted last year when Honduran pilots twice shot down suspected drug planes in violation of their agreement with the US.  After a brief closure, the service was reinstated after the Honduran military reluctantly agreed to reinforce the agreed-upon protocol with their pilots.

[Deleted final paragraph referring to the plane as of known US origin.]

Last Polls in Honduran Presidential Election: Dead Heat

In Honduras, it is illegal to poll the last month before the presidential election.

Today El Heraldo published the results of the latest, and last, CID Gallup poll in the presidential race.

Their headline: At one month before the elections, JOH one point advantage over Xiomara.

Our headline: Honduran Presidential Election Enters Final Stage in a Statistical Tie.

Based on polling conducted October 6-15, the CID Gallup poll reportedly finds voters who intend to vote breaking 28% for the Partido Nacional (Juan Orlando Hernández), 27% for LIBRE (Xiomara Castro), 17% for the Partido Liberal (Mauricio Villeda), and 9% for the Anti-Corruption Party (Salvador Nasrallah), with 3% each for the candidacies of Andres Pavon and Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, and a reported 3% "do not know/declined to respond".

The absolute numbers in these Gallup polls are always higher than those in other polls, apparently because they are not including the voters who say they may not vote. The trends are clear when we look at the Gallup polling data over time: Nasralla continues to slide down; Villeda has drawn a small number of voters as the Anti-Corruption party declined; but the main increase tracking the decreases in the Anti-Corruption Party is in the institutional Partido Nacional.

There is evidence in this latest poll, as there was previously in the fine grained data from CESPAD, that party affiliation is breaking down. While the Liberal Party was identified as the party affiliation by 22% of those polled, Villeda draws only 17% of the vote. Similarly, while Hernández has a reported 28% of the intended vote, 35% of those polled identified as Partido Nacional members.

CID Gallup doesn't let us speculate on where those other Partido Liberal and Nacional voters are going; CESPAD, though, showed in August that 23% of Liberal Party voters then favored LIBRE, as did 7.6% of Partido Nacional voters not favoring Hernández, with almost the same number then planning to vote for Nasrallah.

El Heraldo's story reports on a number of other polls, some of which, like Paradigma, we have been steadily tracking. These minor polls range from one by Opinión y Analísis that has Hernández at 28.1%, Castro at 23%, and Villeda at 20.1%; to TecniMerk showing Castro winning with 31.9%, Hernández at 22.8%, and Villeda at 13.2%.

While these two minor polls should be questioned due to the wide margins of victory they project, not seen in other polls, they are at least consistent with the other polling that shows LIBRE and the Partido Nacional running head to head. A third minor poll mentioned by El Heraldo, from a firm called Inteligence, seems anything but credible, as it is alone in having the Partido Liberal ahead, with 34.8% of the vote, leading the Partido Nacional at 28.33% and supposedly showing LIBRE in third place at 16,15%. It is almost as if this poll inadvertently reversed LIBRE and the Partido Liberal.

One of these candidates will receive the most votes in November. If election monitoring prevents fraud-- a big if in Honduras-- that same candidate will become the next president.

The current polling data do not allow identification of a clear leader, but do tell us that the traditional two party system has been effectively challenged for the first time in Honduran history: LIBRE and the Partido Nacional are the clear leaders vying for control of the presidency, and one of these did not exist at the time of the last election.

Whatever the outcome, the political landscape has changed in Honduras.

October poll from Paradigma

Presidential poll results just published on the Paradigma website show Partido Nacional candidate Juan Orlando Hernández pulling ahead of LIBRE party candidate Xiomara Castro de Zelaya for the first time in the presidential race, 25.7% to 22.2%. The margin of error is indicated as +/- 1.54%.

Where are these additional voters coming from? Two possibilities present themselves.

The number of voters answering "none of the above" declined 2.8%. At the same time, the number declining to state a preference went up by 1.3%, so it is quite possible that what we are seeing in those two categories is mostly the same pool of uncommitted voters, answering the pollsters slightly differently.

The more interesting possibility we see here is that the slight movement to Juan Orlando Hernández-- if it is real, and not just statistical noise-- is coming from Liberal Party voters who know that Mauricio Villeda is not viable, and find the pro-business, pro-security centrism of Hernández more acceptable than the mild social democratic progressivism of LIBRE. In the latest poll, Villeda declined 1.3%, from 12% in September to 10.7% now.

It isn't particularly surprising that LIBRE's support has flattened-- actually, it is surprising it hasn't been more badly affected by the negative campaigning going on. Whether it is distributing fake LIBRE flyers that make exaggerated claims that LIBRE will make Honduras into another Cuba, or Oscar Alvarez in El Heraldo portraying LIBRE as a threat to people's safety because the party opposes the militarized police, or the republication of Roger Noriega's insane argument that constitutional reform would "open the country to drug trafficking", this is a dirty contest. And then there's the string of assassinations of LIBRE candidates and activists, documented by Rights Action.

So it might be worth making two last points, before this very modest difference between the two lead candidates is interpreted as definitive.

First, the Partido Nacional claims they have a private poll showing their candidate 7 points ahead, not reflected in the latest poll. This is especially interesting because today Oscar Alvarez specifically was quoted as claiming,

various polls such as Paradigma place JOH very far above the candidate Xiomara Castro.

Must be some other "Paradigma", because this one has this race continuing to be closely contested.

The candidate for one of the two traditional parties, enjoying all the advantages of organization, control of the entire government, and benefiting from a media campaign to demonize his competitor, is struggling to pull past the candidate of a new party with none of those advantages.

Second: 30.8% of the respondents still either declined to state a preference or declared an intention not to vote for any of the listed candidates.

So the leading candidate in this historic election remains "None of the Above".

Juan Orlando Hernández: Let's Rethink Human Rights

Proceso Digital reported Thursday that the candidate for president from the Partido Nacional thinks it is time to reconsider the concept of human rights.

Not, unfortunately, in the way one might hope, given Honduras' human rights failings.

No, Juan Orlando Hernández thinks we are doing a little too much coddling of people with that old-fashioned concept. During a campaign event in northern Honduras, he reportedly said

“I am conscious that if a public official, a police officer or a soldier should commit a crime you have to protect human rights, but the problem is that they don't talk about the rights of the victims."

In other words: in order to protect crime victims, Hernández would like the police and military to have some leeway on those expectations of observing human rights.

We wish this were not really what he said. Actually, it is worse.

The candidate was trying to explain why he was the only one of eight contestants for President who failed to sign a "security pact" promoted by the CRSP-- the state Comisión de Reforma de la Seguridad Pública.

This is the independent commission set up by legislative mandate to address the corruption and poor performance of the Honduran government bodies that should be responsible for investigating crime and prosecuting criminals. CRSP proposed that all parties subscribe to a plan that "would guarantee a profound transformation in the system and improve the results of the Secretaría de Seguridad, Ministerio Público and Poder Judicial".

Juan Orlando Hernández said he did not sign because

“I do not agree with this pact, it seems to me that is lacking a lot. It is unacceptable that it isn't clear that the Armed Forces should play a role as protagonist in recovering the peace and tranquility of the country, that does not appear right to me".

The pact goes further than that: it calls for reaffirmation of the civil role of the national police and the revamping of police on a community policing model. Since Juan Orlando Hernández was the principal architect of the new Policia Militar, it would be a bit awkward to endorse repudiation of that approach.

So the candidate of the Partido Nacional goes into the last weeks of the race as the only presidential candidate who did not agree, if elected to enact the core commitments of the CRSP accord:

• to undertake a comprehensive reform of the system of Public Security
• to completely revamp the entire police system to create a true Community Police "close to the community, transparent in its performance, efficient in its functioning, respectful of human rights and the basic norms of the State of Law"
• to reaffirm respect for the strictly civil and nonpartisan nature of all the National Police, and of the professional, independent, and apolitical character of the attorneys and judges
• to promote prevention of violence and crime through education, recreational programs, and employment for youth
• to promote civic participation in community security and violence prevention
• to maintain a constant fight against corruption of the offices of justice
• to consolidate the respect for human rights, government transparency, and accountability

The signed document shows the neatly typed signature block for the Partido Nacional candidate, devoid of his endorsement, contrasting with the signatures of all the other candidates.

Maybe Juan Orlando Hernández knows something no one else does, and believes that standing up for militarized police will give him the edge he needs to take the lead.

But as it stands, his breaking ranks simply underlines that his is the candidacy of militarizing everyday life. And if his opponents pursue the point, it could raise awkward questions about his lack of commitment to anti-corruption, pro-accountability policies.

"The freedom and fairness of this election is very much at risk": US Congress members

In a letter dated October 15, Representatives Mike Honda, Raul Grijalva, and Hank Johnson urge Secretary of State John Kerry to speak out against factors that they argue make "the freedom and fairness" of the Honduran presidential election questionable.

You can read their press release for their comments on why they wrote. The headline singles out "Militarization of Civil Society Ahead of Honduran Election".

They note that the new militarized police was a signature policy of the presidential candidate of the Partido Nacional. They express concern about the consolidation of control over all branches of government by the same ruling party-- including control of the electoral process.

We agree that the integrity of the electoral process must be a concern.

But even more troubling, the congress members draw attention to a pattern of assassinations of candidates for office from the LIBRE party. They cite sixteen "activists and candidates" murdered since June 2012. Anthropologist Adrienne Pine reports a similar number, and comments that

LIBRE has been focused on keeping the campaign positive, and so the official reaction to all the targeted assassinations...has been near silence.

The congress members express concern that the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa

has not spoken more forcefully about the militarization of the police under the impetus of one of the candidates, expressed concern with the National party's concentration of institutional power through illegal means, and condemned the ongoing intimidation against the members of the opposition.

The letter ends with a polite yet firm indictment of the US for taking a premature position on the election in 2009-- when the country was under intermittent states of siege, with a government repudiated by the entire world in control of the presidential elections-- and declining to take a stronger position today. They write:

We are of the opinion that our government would lose credibility in Honduras and the region should it be perceived as taking sides in the election or turning a blind eye to fraud and unfair electoral conditions....It also appears that the State Department has largely countenanced the concentration of institutional power in Honduran government in the past year, in the hands of the ruling party candidate, through illegal means.

That leads to the letter's final request that the US State Department

use every available means to ensure free and fair elections... to guarantee a level playing field in the weeks preceding the election,... and to be entirely neutral in its public and private messages to this country. In addition, we request the Department of State to speak forcefully against the pattern of concerted attacks targeting human rights defenders and the opposition.

"To be entirely neutral in its public and private messages to this country".

As these Congress members note, the US State Department has come out as neutral in the election, and willing to work with whatever candidate wins. One would have hoped that went without saying, but the implication is that at least some political actors in Honduras may think the US government is tacitly or quietly or privately favoring specific candidates-- those that represent the traditional political hierarchy of the Partido Nacional and Partido Liberal. To be neutral shouldn't require assurances that you will work with whoever is elected (implicitly, however repugnant their policies might be). Neutrality is interpretable in this context as hoping LIBRE doesn't pull ahead.

As the writers of this letter note,

many in the region are well aware that in the past, the United States government has indeed supported specific candidates in Latin American elections, particularly in Central America.

They cite in particular the 2009 election in Honduras when the US announced it would recognize the outcome of the Honduran election, literally while people in Honduras were living under conditions suppressing their freedoms of speech and assembly, and despite the lack of any clear path for independent international observation of the election in 2009. That premature announcement derailed negotiations that might have led to the 2009 election being held with the elected president restored to office; instead, the 2009 election was seen by a wide sector of the population as illegitimate.

Read the letter for yourself. These are serious concerns by serious people paying attention. As this tight election heads into its final weeks, the range of tactics used by the Partido Nacional is already becoming ugly. Maybe the US is irrelevant in Honduras; but no one I know believes that.