How the Honduran Election Was Stolen

[Judi Lynn]

Dispatch from Tegucigalpa
How the Honduran Election Was Stolen
by EMILY ACHTENBERG
December 09, 2013

Driving into Tegucigalpa to observe Honduras’s November 24 presidential election, our 17-member National Lawyers Guild delegation searched in vain for billboards featuring Xiomara Castro, candidate of the LIBRE (Freedom and Refoundation) party and wife of former President Mel Zelaya, ousted in a 2009 coup. Instead, Juan Orlando Hernández, candidate of the well-heeled ruling National Party—with whom Castro ran neck-and-neck in the pre-election polls—greeted us from virtually every inch of costly advertising space. It was an early sign of the extreme disparities of wealth and power that cast a long shadow over the election, creating formidable—and likely insurmountable—obstacles for the fledgling anti-coup resistance party in its first venture into national politics.

According to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Hernández won the presidency with 37% of the vote, well ahead of Castro at 29% and the Liberal Party candidate at 20%. (Honduran election law does not provide for a runoff if no candidate wins a majority.) But LIBRE, together with the libertarian Anti-Corruption Party (PAC) which received 14% of the vote, has refused to recognize the official results, denouncing an “electoral fraud of incalculable proportions.” Following a massive protest march last Sunday, the TSE agreed to a partial public recount.

The official results dashed the hopes and expectations for change shared by a broad-based alliance of LIBRE supporters including campesinos, trade unionists, indigenous, LGBT, women’s, and student groups, and even some businessmen who have grown alarmed at the state of Honduras’s economy. Since the coup, poverty levels and the gap between rich and poor have increased dramatically, with Honduras now showing the greatest wealth disparities in Latin America. As industrialist and LIBRE supporter Adolfo Facussé has noted, “Poor people dying of hunger, that’s not good for business.”

As international observers, we were impressed by the high level of civic engagement exhibited by the Honduran people, and by the progress that has been achieved towards creating a more transparent and accountable electoral system in a society with fragile democratic institutions. But these advances were far outweighed—and indeed subverted—by the circumstances of concentrated power, militarization, and targeted repression in which the election occurred, creating opportunities for electoral abuse and compromising the integrity of the process long before voters arrived at the polls.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/09/how-the-honduran-election-was-stolen/

[roody]

1. More Honduras info at

http://www.soaw.org/

[questionseverything]

2. ...

The election featured significant technological advances, including a much-vaunted electronic transmission system which allowed each table’s hand-counted voting tallies to be scanned directly to a centralized TSE database. This was a vast improvement over the past practice of calling in the results by cell phone, but also introduced new levels of problems. Some 600 voting centers (more than 10%) lacked the electricity or internet connections required for scanning.

Then, the TSE’s published voting results for some tables turned out not to match the scanned tallies, often—but not always—reflecting an undercount for LIBRE or PAC. This was not surprising to us, having watched hundreds of TSE recruits transcribing the scanned tallies into the database late into the night after the election, in a process that left considerable room for error, if not abuse.

An independent, non-partisan review of the database by a group of concerned citizens has sought to reconcile these inconsistencies. While their analysis leaves the candidates in the same relative position, it also confirms significant flaws in the TSE software—underscored by Honduras Anonymous’s recent hackings into the system.

Digging a few layers deeper, LIBRE claims that many of the scanned tallies in the TSE database don’t match the copies received by the party, suggesting possible tampering either at the National Party-controlled voting tables or later by the TSE. In some cases, LIBRE notes, the official tally sheets are missing from the database altogether. In still others, the number of votes counted exceeds the number of voters, or reflects an absurdly high voter turnout. A sample of suspicious tally sheets culled from the database by SOA Watch illustrates some of these anomalies. (The database, for all its flaws, is completely accessible to the public.)