The result of Honduras’ presidential election remained in limbo on Wednesday, with a gregarious TV host’s surprise lead narrowing sharply, prompting him to call on supporters to take to the streets of the capital to defend the vote.
President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who won U.S. praise for helping tackle the flow of migrants and deporting drug cartel leaders, was favored to win before Sunday’s vote in the poor Central American nation with one of the world’s highest murder rates.
But a delayed, partial count on Monday morning pointed toward an unexpected victory for TV entertainer Salvador Nasralla, 64. Inexplicably, election authorities then stopped giving results for more than 24 hours.
When, under mounting criticism from international election monitors over a lack of transparency, the electoral tribunal began updating its website again, the direction of the vote rapidly began to change.
In a television interview on Tuesday evening, an angry Nasralla said the election was being stolen from him and asked his supporters to flock to the capital, Tegucigalpa, to protest.
“We’ve already won the election,” he said. “I‘m not going to tolerate this, and as there are no reliable institutions in Honduras to defend us, tomorrow the Honduran people need to defend the vote on the streets.”
The Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization of American States in Honduras urged people to remain calm and wait for official results, which it said should be delivered as quickly and transparently as possible.
“The credibility of the electoral authorities and the legitimacy of the future president depend on this,” it said in a statement.
Early on Wednesday morning, Nasralla’s original five-point lead had thinned to under 1.5 percentage points, with about 73 percent of ballots counted, according to the election tribunal. The account then ground to a halt, presumably as election officials slept.
Nasralla said in a later television interview that the election tribunal was only counting ballots from regions where Hernandez had won, skewing the results and giving the false sense that the president was heading for victory. He asked the tribunal to include ballots from regions where he was stronger.
Election official Marcos Ramiro Lobo told Reuters on Monday afternoon that Nasralla was leading by a margin of five points, with about 70 percent of ballots counted.
Lobo said Nasralla appeared certain to win, signaling that experts at the electoral body regarded his lead as irreversible.
