OPPOSITION CANDIDATE MAINTAINS SOLID LEAD
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras
Leftist opposition candidate Xiomara Castro held a commanding lead Monday as Hondurans appeared poised to remove the conservative National Party from power after 12 years of continuous rule.
Castro declared herself the winner despite orders from the National Electoral Council to political parties to await official results.
“We win! We win!” Castro, Honduras’ former first lady who is making her third presidential run, told cheering Liberty and Re-foundation Party supporters when only a fraction of the ballots had been tallied. “Today the people have obtained justice. We have reversed authoritarianism.”
The National Party also quickly declared victory for its candidate, Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry Asfura, but the early returns were not promising.
By early Monday, Castro’s wide early lead was holding up. With 51 percent of the polling station tallies in, Castro had 53 percent of the votes and Asfura 33 percent, according to the National Electoral Council preliminary count. With more than 1.8 million votes counted, Castro held a margin of more than 350,000 votes. The council said turnout was more than 68 percent.
The National Electoral Council stopped updating the preliminary results just before 7 a.m. As the morning wore on, concern grew that there was a problem.
However, council systems engineer Gerardo Martinez explained that those early results were made possible through the Preliminary Results Transmission system, an effort to get preliminary results more quickly to the public.
The system had worked and on Monday morning, having served its purpose, it was disabled, he said.
“Its job was to divulge preliminary results and that already ended,” Martinez said. “Starting this afternoon we move to counting mode.”
Martinez explained that the council was now waiting for all of the physical voting place tallies to arrive at its warehouses to begin the process of counting the votes in front of representatives of the political parties. Then the updating of the results will resume.
The capital awoke slowly Monday after a long night of celebration. As stacks of newspapers hit the sidewalks around the city, it was clear the country’s major outlets could not resist giving the victory to Castro despite warnings from the National Electoral Council to wait for official results.