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.

Exit polling for the National Party...

NotiBomba has just identified the company that did exit polling for the Partido Nacional-- polling on which Juan Orlando Hernández based his claim of re-election. It apparently is owned by Arturo Corrales, former member of Hernández government. Not a company with any track record in this kind of work.

While widely reported in the English language media, the claim by Hernández was seen by Hondurans as an affront to their system which calls for waiting for results from the Tribunal Supremo Electoral.

The early announcement by Hernández is widely viewed as a strategy to make it harder for people to accept eventual results which might show a closer race, or even a win by his opponent.

The fact that the exit poll was produced by a party apparatchik will hardly give those skeptics greater confidence.

Statement from the Tribunal Supremo Electoral

Although the audio quality on our feed was bad, comparing what we heard to Twitter, it appears the TSE has announced that it has counted more than 40% of the vote, but that they have not counted enough to be confident in projecting the trend (that is, projecting a victor).

They say they will hold another press conference at midnight.

Meanwhile, this is actually quite important. If the kind of margin that sources had been predicting for the National Party (without, we emphasize, any reliable basis) was being seen, the TSE would historically have indicated what they call the "trend".

So we have to assume that the results are emerging closer than the rumors that were spread in pre-election coverage, and that continue to circulate in media quoting Hernández's claims of victory based on (again, unspecified) exit polling.

Reports from Honduras have cited heavy turnout, apparently unexpected. While the TSE has not provided any numbers, based on these on the ground reactions, it appears that more voters were motivated to participate. Certainly, high turnout would account for the TSE not having better counts six hours after the polls closed across the country.

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.

Election Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we will be watching as well.