Honduras Still Has No President-Elect Week After Vote

Honduras on Sunday marked a week without definitive vote results from the Honduran National Electoral Council (CNE) indicating who won the November 30 presidential election.

It is reportedly estimated that 3.7 million Honduran voters headed to the polls on Sunday, November 30, for that day’s general election — a process now marred by the CNE’s slow and lengthy presidential vote count process, which remains unfinished at press time.

Of all participating candidates, the presidential race was led by politician Nasry Asfura of the conservative National Party of Honduras (PNH), former vice president Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, and former Defense Minister Rixi Moncada of far-left Liberty and Refoundation (Libre) party. The Libre party currently rules Honduras through the administration of socialist President Xiomara Castro. Days before the election, Asfura received President Donald Trump’s endorsement in the race, which both Nasralla and Moncada criticized.

The first preliminary results published by CNE indicated that, of the three main candidates, the race was set to be a razor-thin competition between Asfura and Nasralla, with both candidates narrowly overtaking each other as new updated results were published throughout the week. Moncada remained in a distant third position with each new vote count update. Her votes, the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo said on Sunday, “do not represent competition” for Asfura and Nasralla.

CNE has halted the slow vote count several times since the November 30 election, attributing it to “technical difficulties” experienced by the service provided hired by the electoral authority for the vote transmission platform. The electoral authority also noted the “technical tie” between the conservative and liberal candidates.

CNE once again halted the counting process on Friday at a time when, with roughly 88 percent of all votes counted, Asfura remained first in the race with an approximately 20,000-vote lead against Nasralla. CNE reportedly justified the new delay due to purported “irregularities” in 14 percent of the vote tallies, which required manual revision and verification before its results are added to the total.

CNE head Ana Paola Hall said during the early morning hours of Monday that the vote count “will resume immediately in the next few minutes, once the final technical steps have been completed by the company conducting the count, with the external audit, and the staff are waiting to be able to restart it.”

Hall stressed that, “despite all the omens, Honduras set a wonderful example” on the behavior exhibited by voters on election day, and added that CNE “remains and will remain steadfast until the very end of the process, which will occur with the official announcement of the results.”

The lack of finalized results and the lack of an official winner of the election placed Honduras in an ongoing state of uncertainty, with both Asfura and Nasralla still “technically tied” at press time as the vote count process enters its second week. El Heraldo reported on Monday that although slight changes in the vote count race were experienced through the morning, Asfura remained in the lead at press time.

In light of the continued delays in the vote count, President Trump expressed his concerns over the slow, drip-fed process last week through a Truth Social post, warning that there will be “hell to pay” if the results are altered. At the time President Trump issued the post, Asfura only had a 515 vote lead on Nasralla.

On Sunday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau expressed the United States’ ongoing concerns over the yet-to-be defined slow presidential race in a social media post.

Landau said:

President Donald Trump has made clear that democracy is on trial in this election in Honduras. The Honduran people deserve to have their will respected and voices heard. All parties must uphold the independence of the National Electoral Council (CNE) to ensure full transparency and a proper count of every vote and tally sheet. The world’s eyes, including ours, are on Honduras.

President Trump explained at the time he gave his endorsement to Asfura that he could work together with the conservative candidate to “fight the narcocommunists.” Trump also issued fierce criticism of the two other candidates, condemning Rixi Moncada over her public admiration of late Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro while branding Nasralla as “borderline communist” due to his past tenure as vice president under the current socialist administration of Xiomara Castro.

Both Nasralla and Moncada rejected President Trump’s endorsement of Asfura and the criticism he espoused towards each candidate.

Last week, Nasralla claimed to Reuters that President Trump’s endorsement of Asfura was a “last-minute interference” that “damaged” his chances of winning by “flipping” the race in favor of the conservative politician. 

Nasralla rejected Trump’s “borderline communist” remarks and identified himself to Reuters as “center-right.” The Liberal party candidate also claimed to the outlet that he had suspicious of electoral “fraud” which allegedly arose after CNE’s website went dark on Thursday and then “everything had flipped” by the time it allegedly came back, with him once again in second place.

Speaking to his followers on Saturday, Nasralla called for CNE to “stop stealing his votes” while branding both Asfura and Moncada as “corrupt.”

“The elections should not be canceled; someone should be appointed to count the votes that have already been cast, even if it takes a long time, however long it takes,” Nasralla reportedly said.

Rixi Moncada, on her part, fiercely criticized President Trump last week, accusing him of allegedly committing “electoral fraud and interference” through a purported “direct imperial foreign interference” for endorsing Asfura. Moncada expressed that she will not recognize the election’s results, which she is set to lose regardless of who wins in the end between Asfura and Nasralla.

Moncada, and the ruling socialist Libre party doubled down on their accusations against Trump on Sunday night, accusing him of “coercing” in the election and calling for an “annulment” of the presidential election. Moncada rejected what she described as the “imperial narrative of communism” which, she claimed, was used as an “attack” against her.

The Libre party denounced Trump’s “foreign interference” and warned that it will disavow any public official who “places themselves at the disposal of and announces cooperation in the government transition with the enemies of the people, the perpetrators of this ongoing electoral coup.”

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.