Polarized Honduran election largely peaceful; results still being counted

Hondurans cast their vote Sunday in a largely peaceful, orderly election, that was nonetheless marred by deep polarization, technological shortfalls and fears of fraud.

The name of Honduras’ deeply unpopular current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was not on the ballot, but many said his presence was palpable at the polls after his government spent the past eight years dismantling the country’s democratic institutions.

The race, which has been neck-and-neck for weeks, pitted Nasry Asfura, the pro-American mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and a member of Hernández’s governing National Party, against Xiomara Castro, the wife of Manuel Zelaya, a leftist former president deposed in a 2009 coup. If elected, Castro would be the first woman to lead Honduras.

Turnout was among the highest recorded in recent decades, but few held out hope that anything fundamental might change in a country worn down by corruption and violence.

“I hope that these elections will be transparent, that there won’t be the same vote-buying as always,” said Dina Padilla, who voted in the working-class neighborhood of Pedregal in the capital, Tegucigalpa.

Castro led Asfura by 19 percentage points with 16 percent of the polls counted, according to the first official results announced by the electoral council Sunday night. Castro captured 53 percent of the vote, compared with 34 percent for Asfura.

The election will test the council’s ability to deliver credible results after a profound overhaul of the electoral system, which was triggered by widespread accusations of fraud in the last general election in 2017.

The chief of the Organization of American States’ electoral observation mission, Costa Rica’s former President Luis Guillermo Solís, called the vote “a beautiful example of citizen participation,” noting the apparent high turnout. He also called on party leaders to abstain from declaring victory until results are counted.

Both main political parties, however, claimed to have won in nearly identical Twitter messages posted while people were still casting votes in the late afternoon.

Some voters have also complained of not being able to cast their vote because of the recent overhaul of the electoral roll. The process eliminated nearly 1 million people in what the reform’s proponents said rid the system of the deceased or emigrated voters whose data was utilized for electoral fraud.

The vote was also marred by the outages of the electoral council’s website, which was down for most of the day, breeding fraud conspiracies among the already suspicious population. The council said it was investigating whether the outage was caused by a cyberattack, without providing additional details.