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.

Proving Electoral Fraud Takes Time

We just had a twitter exchange with Alberto Arce, reporter for the AP. Here it is:

1. albertoarce ‏@alberarce 1h

   ¿por qué los periodistas tenemos esa mala manía de pedir pruebas de las cosas que la gente denuncia?.
2. Honduras Cult Politi ‏@HondurasCultPol 8m

   @alberarce why do proofs have to be provided faster than the TSE counts the vote? Maybe press could consider giving people time to respond

   
   
3. albertoarce ‏@alberarce 36s

   @HondurasCultPol I am not reporting fraud if those who claim it dont show the evidence. LIBRE said they won with 2.8% of the vote counted.

albertoarce ‏@alberarce 4m

@HondurasCultPol this is what I do. Report the findings of the intnal observers, the official results and wait.

As we added: we are fine with you waiting. Not so fine with the press setting the timeline for action.

Here's the issue for us: the TSE should be providing accurate counts. The international community is acting as if the TSE is providing accurate counts. So the approach is: prove these aren't the real numbers.

There are ongoing efforts to do just that. We are doing our own analysis, and have found that there are discrepancies with at least 500 actas so far.

Whether these errors result in a systematic undercount of LIBRE and/or PAC votes, or systematically add votes to the Partido Nacional, is not clear yet. Getting this kind of convincing, systematic documentation takes time.

We don't expect Alberto Arce, or any other reporter, to claim fraud. We just would hope that the international press could be a little more nuanced in reporting this story. If you are used to European or US electoral systems, it is hard to give credence to how things are done in Honduran elections-- to the essential fragility of the vote count system.

The TSE needs this long to tally part of the vote; demanding that the proof of inconsistencies be presented faster than the TSE counts can seem like taking sides to those frustrated by the process itself. And yes, that will make people in Honduras suspicious and critical of the press.

Anonymous and the TSE

Early Thursday Tiempo published a story headlined Anonymous enters the database of the TSE.

At the top of the screen is an image with the following caption:

Anonymous Honduras publicó esta imagen en su cuenta de Twitter en la cual demuestra que el Tribunal Supremo Electoral no contabiliza en el informe oficial 80 votos obtenidos por LIBRE, según el acta que registra los datos del centro de votación de una urna de la Escuela Ramón Amaya Amador de La Lima, Cortés.

[Anonymous Honduras published this image in its Twitter account in which it shows that the Tribunal Supremo Electoral did not count in the official results 80 votes obtained by LIBRE, according to the acta registering the data from the voting center of the polling place at the Escuela Ramón Amaya Amador in La Lima, Cortés.]

The lead paragraph is blunt:

Los hackers han puesto en tela de juicio la seguridad de la base de datos del Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) y han afirmado por medio de las redes sociales que si hubo fraude electrónico en estas elecciones.

[The hackers have cast doubt on the security of the TSE database and have affirmed by means  of social networks that there has been electronico fraud in these elections.]

Tiempo quotes Anonymous of Honduras saying there were "thousands" of pieces of evidence of this fraud on a blog they established where

los seguidores de esa organización cibernética que actúa bajo la clandestinidad colocaron imágenes de actas y las tablas oficiales de resultados que no concuerdan con los datos.

[followers of this cybernetic organization that acted clandestinely placed images of actas and the official tables of results that do not agree with the data.]

Separately, Tiempo reports that another hacker published details for accessing the database. They quote their own IT specialist, José Carlos Ramos saying that

the hackers are trying to demonstrate that the system of the TSE doesn't have the necessary security measures. "If it is the way the hackers say, the data base can be accessed from any place in Honduras or the world... It could be consulted and modified by a user that had access privileges from someplace outside the Tribunal."

Needless to say, this is not good news for those who would like the TSE count to be accepted as official and accurate. And it is not good news for Hondurans in general who turned out for this historic election.

Honduran Congress will be Transformed

Like many others, we have been waiting to hear what the effects would be on the Honduran Congreso Nacional would be from the high voter turnout and extremely split voting evident in the presidential election.

According to El Heraldo, the Partido Nacional has lost control of the congress, retaining only 47 seats. While that is the largest delegation, it is nowhere near a majority of the 128 seat body.
Even though some results have not been tallied, and the Partido Nacional delegation may grow, it is not projected to have a majority. If Juan Orlando Hernández intends to govern, he and his party will have to work with others.

And if others don't want to cooperate, they can form their own coalitions and control congress-- the body which, ironically, has concentrated power continuously under the leadership of Hernández.

The Partido Liberal, traditionally the other powerhouse, will end up with 26 congress members.

But it is the two new parties that have made a really astonishing showing. There was no necessary connection to be assumed between the presidential and congressional elections; ballots for each are separate, and it could easily have been the case that a voter would reject the traditional party candidate for president (as a majority did reject Hernández) and still give their votes to the congress member of that party.

So it reflects a broader strength of LIBRE that it has the second largest congressional delegation, with 39 members. And, as El Heraldo notes, the real surprise was the strength of the Partido Anti-Corrupción, which will participate in the new congress with 13 members.

Three other long-established small parties, the Christian Democrats, the left-leaning Partido de Unificación Democrática, and PINU, each are projected to have a single delegate in congress.

We can do no better than to quote the conclusion drawn by El Heraldo:

The results of the 2013 general elections break with the hegemony that has been maintained in the last 32 years of democracy by the Partido Nacional and Partido Liberal, and LIBRE and PAC have converted themselves into two new political forces that will have a counterweight in approving the laws and decisions that the new Congress will take.

While it may seem like little consolation to the myriads of LIBRE voters who truly think they won at the polls, only to see the TSE count emerge otherwise, having such a strong presence in Congress has put LIBRE, in its first foray into national politics, into a place from which to argue for changes in the direction the country has been headed.

That makes Honduras worth continued international attention as the new government takes over in January, and for the rest of the four year term until the next election.

TSE Vote Counting Errors

The OAS audit of the TSE's software was accurate in its concerns: the vote counting part is turning out to be less than perfect.

Observers have noted several anomalies, some of which have been corrected, and others of which have not.  Here's an example that was still visible in the system as of this morning.

Consider the following screenshot (from the TSE's website here) taken at 1:19 pm today.  Click on the image for a larger version.

This shows the scanned Acta for MER 3311 of the Escuela Leonardo Aguilar Oseguera school voting site in San Pedro Sula. On the left is the scanned Acta; on the right are the vote totals that the TSE credited to each candidate for this MER.

Precisely how those vote totals enter the system is unclear from TSE-provided information.  Are the handwritten Actas submitted to an automatic optical character recognition system (ReadIRIS was mentioned in one TSE story about the vote counting system) or are the tallies entered by someone reading and entering the values for each candidate?

In either case, the vote total listed for Nasralla on the TSE website is only 3 votes, not the 103 votes listed on the tally sheet.

We are not alleging any mischief here (although that's possible). Rather, this is precisely the kind of sloppiness the OAS audit of the software used led us to expect.

This Acta should have failed the software confidence checks (because the number of votes in the tallies does not match the number of votes allegedly cast in this MER). But it either wasn't flagged by the system supposed to catch such inconsistencies (it should have detected as an under vote), or else a human intervened and OK'd the result: human error.

In either case the erroneous numbers were submitted to the vote tallying system with these inconsistencies and were tallied, giving Salvador Nasralla of the PAC party 100 fewer votes than he actually received from this mesa.

These are all officially approved tallies, officially approved errors, not the Actas sequestered for inconsistencies. An Acta does not appear on the website if it hasn't been included in the vote totals, so the TSE thinks there's no problem with this one.

We beg to differ. 

This is just a single example of the kinds of errors we are seeing in the vote totals publicly provided by the TSE.  The sad part is that it is not unique. There are many similar kinds of errors visible in the Actas posted on the TSE website.

The software audit by the OAS said the vote totaling system did not meet international standards for such systems and needed a lot more work (and a reimplementation) to do so.  It looks like the TSE went ahead and used this poor quality software, which would mean it should independently audit all of the Actas and vote totals for consistency and sanity (meaning, are the numbers reported consistent with the number of voters in a specific mesa) before declaring anyone a winner.

Other errors that were apparent earlier are now systematically being corrected, so it will not surprise me if by the time this blog entry is published, the errors I know about (including the one above) have been made to disappear.

But it is these kinds of failings, and silent corrections without acknowledging the failings, that reduce public confidence in the TSE and its official results, leading people like Salvador Nasralla and Manuel Zelaya Rosales, ask for a public, open, recount of the official Actas before the TSE declares a winner.

A public recount of the Actas would go a long way to providing confidence that everyone is adding up the same numbers to get the same vote totals, which frankly would improve public perception of the TSE.

Without that, no matter how many international observers say the process on Sunday was legitimate, there will remain large segments of the Honduran people who believe that the process after Sunday was not.

Two-thirds into the tally...

Actually 61.72%, to be precise-- according to the TSE in Honduras.

(I will admit to a bias here: as a sometimes-quantitative social scientist, two places to the right of the decimal point on things like this always make me think: false precision! and never more so than when we are dealing with a deeply problematic process of adding numbers from, essentially, emails.)

The margin between the reported leading candidates got a little closer (in percentage) and a little wider (in votes): 98,881 votes now separate Juan Orlando Hernández and Xiomara Castro, with his percentage now closer to 34% and hers almost up to 29%:

Partido Nacional 631,079 votes: 34.19%
LIBRE 532,198 votes: 28.83%
Partido Liberal 383,203 votes: 20.76%
Partido Anti-Corrupción 287,747 votes: 15.59%

There are reports, sometimes garbled in the English language coverage, that cite the fact that the TSE is concealing or suppressing the numbers from 20% of the tallies. This can be traced to the statements of Enrique Reina, the designado of the LIBRE party, last night, contained in LIBRE's press statement:

The data that the TSE has released are not sufficient to indicate a trend, owing to the fact that more than 20% of the total tallies in its power have not been counted owed to supposed anomalies.

In other news coverage, Reina elaborated:

there exist differences of more than 20% that do not coincide with the [counts] announced and that could change the outcome... they have slowed the sending of the official counts in which LIBRE is winning to set back the count to their advantage ... the TSE does the same by not counting talleys in which we won and that strangely have been scanned with the end turned over to hide the number and they are those that are being sent for auditing...What we know is that the tallies of the departments in which our numbers indicate a great advantage have not been counted or are being detained for reasons that we do not know.

The same points were reiterated by José Manuel Zelaya today, speaking on behalf of the party.

It may seem to outside observers that these objections are simply sour grapes. But the reality of elections in Honduras makes it imperative that all the votes are tallied, because manipulation of results in counting does occur.

In 2009, the original reported turnout was widely hailed as a major victory. In the end, the numbers came down, as the TSE completed counting. A few English-language media corrected their original, hasty stories (which were accurate reports of what the TSE was saying) but most did not.

With a reported 20% of ballot box summaries having "anomalies" requiring them to be validated before being added to the total count, all it takes is for those ballot boxes to be systematically skewed to have official results not match real voting.

Everyone should hold on before pronouncing this process is at an end.

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).