Opposition supporters protesting during a rally against alleged electoral fraud in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 03 December 2017. A victory by president Juan Orlando Hernandez looms over the horizon over a week after the disputed presidential elections in Honduras. The opposition accuses the government of electoral fraud and won't recognise the results. The situation could escalate. Photo: Delmer Membreno/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
After the elections of November 26, when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TES) – with an unprecedented 10-hour delay and under pressure from international observers – announced that the Alianza de Oposición’s candidate Salvador Nasralla had an advantage of 5% over the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, citizens celebrated the triumph on social media, even though many citizens still suspected that fraud and institutional complicity before the final count count change the scenario. It also should be noted that the incumbent should not have been a candidate for the presidency to begin with because the Constitution prohibits reelection through an unmodifiable article.
Despite the seemingly irreversible advantage in favor of the opposition, the president of the TSE refused to officially recognize Nasralla’s victory and advised that an announcement should not be made before the final count. In subsequent statements to the Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro, Ramiro Lobo, substitute magistrate of the TSE, said that the president "did not want to disclose the results because his party, the National Party, was losing". According to him, the counting system machines, although slow, worked as expected in the first hours and days after, in which "Nasralla had an advantage that already set a trend. But when the system was back up after collapsing for a short time, the trend had already reversed and remained that way". After the apparent technical collapse and subsequent recovery of the system, the results disclosed by the TSE showed a clear advantage of the pro-government candidate over the opposition candidate. Thanks to the magic of the voting system’s collapse, a trend that seemed irreversible was reversed.
