Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle on the election

¿Como? ¿Quienes les ganamos, a quienes, porque y para que? 
How? Who won, over whom, why and what for?

                                                         

 To my skeptical friends:

The two parties of opposition have, since yesterday, counted all the poll tallies and the Alianza wins with the same 5% margin that was published by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral on Monday. Interesting that the victory could be so overwhelming when the polls by the Liberal and National parties, of private business and some by the Embassy continued foretelling the defeat of the Alianza up to a couple of weeks ago, that it would not manage to harvest more than 25%. The press in the USA followed, giving the win to JOH up to the very day of the elections. In Northern Europe, the same. On the one hand, important sectors there would prefer the status quo, to foretell his triumph was a way to support him. On the other hand, people were afraid to say it, and hid their determination. The rest is obvious.

Certainly, it is an extreme case. In the electoral canton in which I am selected to vote and to supervise, in Las Carmenes, in San Pedro, Luis Zelaya didn't even get 10%. The Alianza won every polling place over JOH, almost 2:1, 60% to 30%, despite the efforts of the mancha brava to pull in votes first, and later to insert twisted votes, and in the end, to impede people from continuing to vote, by prematurely closing the gates. But even in the neighborhoods of the bourgeousie, in San Pedro Sula, the Alianza won the majority of polling places. And the margin of advantage for Salvador on the North Coast and the west-- with the most urbanized population-- will keep safe the final result. We can say the triumph of the Alianza, thanks to Salvador, and God help him. We lost the mayors. There is no local leadership of the Alianza!

This stubbornness in hanging on to executive power is also interesting, which is not only personal to the despot. The first news indicated that los cachos (the conservatives) would hold many municipalities and-- thanks to the atavistic slate-- an important part of the Legislature. This instinctive tenacity of the mancha brava and total lack of responsibility is a dangerous bet, because JOH couldn't govern with 60% of public opinion against him and could lose everything. This could empowered Nasralla in his position to call for a strike and a Constitutional convention now, and it would be over. They could disappear. As happened with the Partido Liberal.

Clearly, there is not on this side less will to defend the conquest, and there are more of us. Who won? Everyone! Beyond Honduras-- that might finally truly reconcile itself, beginning with the recognition of that necessity-- Nasralla won of course, and the recomposed opposition, when LIBRE became the largest party with Mel at its head. Those who asked for the vote and those who, without being candidates, worked to attract them won, as -- in the end-- definitively, we won the voters. Some electoral tribunal officials [Marco Ramiro Lobo] will gain in general recognition, although the performance of the TSE in the end was calamitous. Never again! At the moment, the militia is gaining credibility!

We are defeating their greater resources and their better organization with our grip and enthusiasm. We are winning by overcoming indolence, indifference, negativity, the inertia of apathy, both our own and that of the voter. Overcoming in some cases the fear derived from the pre-electoral violence or the impression that the triumph of fraud was inevitable. Attaining the vote, with our own means, at times also with some sacrifice. Voting massively with a level of participation that hasn't been seen since the 1980s. We cusucos, armadillos, were too much for the fraud. The voters favored us with a majority very much higher than the official figure.

The notable failure of the eternal traps is also interesting. That, at least in the urban ambit, these don't work anymore. Could fraud influence the count of the totality of the vote for congress members, that the cachos, better organized, count on their own and in their manner? Could be. But the principal problem there is that there is no binding theme like re-election, and we voters of the Alianza are more critical and rebellious than the cachurecos. Not that there wasn't, it's clear there was, cheating. It is tiring to list them. Over in the lands of Fito Irías, famous for his gadgets, various activists were detained filling ballot boxes, afterward sent via helicopter to the site in Tegucigalpa, where at the last moment the mancha brava tried to rob ballot boxes. Here in El Ocotillo there were detected and detained bad citizens who were creating el trencito, a little train: one entered the polling station with hidden marked votes, deposited those that he carried and pulled out another group of sealed ballots, for the next and charged... they fished. Everywhere there appeared marked as deceased the people that someone supposed were ours. In El Carmen there was a a voter who was asked for his vote and ID, to photograph his vote to go out and sell it. Angry young men hurried by the well-paid activists who walked from midday on with money and some cases of falsified ID cards paying people to vote with them in the polling places where they controlled the oversight, which was discovered when-- later-- the actual owners of the identities arrived to vote, finding that someone had already voted for them, living a fingerprint "por no saber firmar" (not knowing how to write).

It wasn't defining. Now what before, on various occasions was just PR of the system was-- really-- a civic festival. There was a complicity among a great diversity of classes, of ages, of affiliations. All people, determined to "remove JOH". Great happiness. And after, equal worry, widely shared. (The manipulation by technicians of the TSE is another role. Almost incredible.)

Over whom did we win? Over JOH the dictator, because he undertook to make it something personal, and his gang, the deceitful cahirecos and their mancha brava, the imposters who see visions, the Cardinal, who was making an electoral intervention until the last minute, denouncing la intolerable injerencia extranjera (the intolerable foreign interference), we won over the bosses Flores and Micheletti, who have never lost everything, and the corrupt journalists and the media companies that misinform and mistake ratings for agreement, over the foreign lobbyists that have come to do so much damage, and also, J.J. Rendón and Arcadia lost.

Why did we win? It wasn't just that Salvador attracted voters or that the people identified with our proposals. Nor was it only a vote against re-election. We won because the people got fed up with JOH. With the omnipresence and almost omnipotence of JOH. They punished him as vain and prepotent, as abusive and cynical, and they will return to do it when it's needed. They voted to restore the agreed upon order and clean up the government. Those of us connected wish to preserve a space for our liberty, menaced by the dismantling of the state of law and sufficient guarantees.

La gente lee de otro modo,  pero cree en su voto.
The people read in another way, but they believe in their vote.

[our translation]

How Cartels Affected the Vote, 2013 and 2017

The presence/absence of drug cartels in certain communities radically corrupted the reported votes in the 2013 election. These were areas that overwhelmingly supported Juan Orlando Hernández in 2013.

Since then, a number of drug cartels have been the focus of activities that have disrupted them, in places like the western Honduran Department of Copan, where the border with Guatemala was the target of cartel activities.

We wondered, has the disruption of drug cartels changed the voting landscape in the 2017 election?

Below we provide a comparison between some key places in the Department of Copan in 2013 and 2017.

(Note, this analysis is based on partial returns for 2017. I used numbers as available at 10:48 pm Honduras time Tuesday.)

Santa Rosa de Copan

First, lets look at a town without much known corruption, Santa Rosa de Copan.  Here's how the voting broke down by party in 2013:

Liberal Party               19.27%
National Party             29.3%
Libre                           32.58%
PAC                            10.36%

These total approximately 91.45% of the reported vote, with smaller parties making up the rest of the voting.

In 2017, with the breakup of PAC and the formation of the Alianza by Libre, PINU, and a large part of what had been PAC, the 2017 results so far look like this:

Liberal Party              11.7%
National Party            30.69%
Alianza                       56.66%

These make up 99.05% of the total vote, with smaller parties splitting the fractional percent remaining.

What this shows is that National Party support here remained about the same as in 2013.  The Liberal Party lost support to the Alianza, and the Alianza combined the original support from Libre, PAC, and some of the small parties like PINU, in addition to drawing away 7% of the Liberal Party's vote.

El Paraiso, Copan

In 2013 the Ardon brothers ran the AA Cartel out of El Paraiso, Copan. 

Hugo Ardon, one of the founding brothers, was the Election campaign head for the National Party in Western Honduras after running the Fondo Vial (road building fund) and giving government contracts to the Cachiros, the Handels, and his friends, the Valle Valle cartels.

Alexander Ardon, Hugo's younger brother, was the mayor of El Paraiso.  In 2014 both brothers are thought to have escaped Honduras to avoid capture, leaving the cartel in the hands of younger family members.  In 2016 the Ardon cartel was thought to have been dismantled with the arrest of two brothers in Morazan, Yoro.

In 2013, El Paraiso, Copan had an alarming number of vote interference stories published in the International press.  We covered some of them here.  In 2013 it reported voting like this:

Liberal Party            3.0%
National Party        88.85%
Libre                        6.3%
PAC                         1.37%

This accounted for 99.52% of the total vote from El Paraiso in 2013.

In 2017, with the relaxation of drug cartel control of the region, voting looks like this:

Liberal Party            16.96%
National Party          50%
Alianza                     32.14%

This accounts for 99.1% of the reported votes. 

The National Party appears to have lost a lot of support between 2013 and 2017.

These may well have been fraudulent votes, as El Paraiso in 2013 had several MER that had overvotes where more people voted  than were registered, with turnout up to 156%. A correlation was noted between the presence of drug cartels and over-voting favoring the National Party. Removing the drug cartels definitely had an effect here.

Also relevant, in 2013 Libre and PAC poll watchers were actively suppressed by individuals with guns. This year, no active voter suppression was reported.

La Florida

La Florida was a town under the control of the Valle Valle cartel in 2013. Unlike El Paraiso's cartel, the Valle Valler were reportedly supporters of the Liberal Party.  Only certain aldeas in the municipality were under their control, though, and while those aldeas voted for the Liberal candidate in 2013, the municipio as a whole voted with the National Party.

In 2013, La Florida voted like this:

Liberal Party           27.11%
National Party         40.34%
Libre                       27.99%
Pac                           4.1%

accounting for 99.54% of the vote.

In 2017 the voting is quite different:

Liberal Party          32.7%
National Party        27.19%
Alianza                   39.71%

accounting for 99.6% of the vote. 

The Liberal Party vote increased 6% while the National Party lost 13%. The Alianza managed to pick up votes beyond those gained by its two founder parties in 2013, picking up a further 7% from the National Party vote. 

This could well reflect a readjustment of the vote following the removal of cartel influence from the region.

The patterns seen in these three cases tend to confirm what we and others argued in the wake of the 2013 election, that in addition to other distorting factors, drug cartels were part of the story.

With that influence removed, we have a snapshot of a region where the National Party has slipped, and the Alianza has gained over its partner parties (Libre and PAC).

While not our main goal when we started this, these three selected municipios demonstrate how variable voting is this year, from place to place. This lends support to suspicions of many that the continuing reporting of vote tallies that favor the incumbent, Juan Orlando Hernández, would be unlikely to happen if the order of counting were random. You might get one municipio going 50% for the National Party, like El Paraiso, but equally you might get vote counts with the Alianza in the lead.

New numbers quietly added to the TSE website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What might we expect when these votes actually are counted?

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

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

Here's those numbers:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.