Tegucigalpa – Honduras’ beleaguered elections commission officially declared incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez as president-elect on Sunday amid ongoing opposition cries of fraud three weeks after election day.<\/p>\n
Hernandez, Honduras’ first president to seek a second term in office, won by 50,446 votes, according to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE).<\/p>\n
The TSE reported that Hernandez received 42.95 percent of the vote, while Opposition Alliance candidate Salvador Nasralla received 41.42 percent.<\/p>\n
Nasralla’s Opposition Alliance refused to recognise the results of the election.<\/p>\n
Hernandez pulled ahead after an hours-long technical problem caused the TSE system to “go down”, overcoming what had appeared to be an insurmountable five percent lead for Nasralla with over half of ballots counted.<\/p>\n
Repeated silences from the TSE and the sharp reversal of results fuelled suspicions of fraud.<\/p>\n
Political analyst Jorge Yllescas told Al Jazeera that the clearest solution to the crisis would be a new “totally transparent” election. He speculated that in that scenario it would be difficult for Hernandez to win given the high levels of rejection of his government.<\/p>\n
He added that if Hernandez stays in power, the fact that he was elected for a second term despite a constitutional ban on re-election would create “a lot of instability for the country” in the next four years. A controversial Supreme Court ruling overturned the ban on re-election in 2015.<\/p>\n
The announcement of the results came hours after Nasralla travelled to Washington, DC, to hold meetings with the OAS and the US Department of State to present evidence of alleged electoral fraud and pressure for an international response to the contested election.<\/p>\n
He added in a telephone interview with local media that he was “optimistic” and suggested he would discuss with the OAS the possible suspension of Honduras from the regional body over a break in the democratic order. The OAS suspended Honduras in 2009 over the military coup.<\/p>\n
The Opposition Alliance, as well as Liberal Party candidate Luis Zelaya, who placed third, had filed challenges to the results. The TSE rejected their petitions.<\/p>\n
The Opposition Alliance had demanded a complete vote-by-vote recount of the country’s more than 18,000 ballot boxes by an independent, impartial commission. The Liberal Party’s Zelaya and some sectors of civil society had called for a fresh election.<\/p>\n
Honduran election law establishes a period of 10 days to file appeals against the results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tegucigalpa – Honduras’ beleaguered elections commission officially declared incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez as president-elect on Sunday amid ongoing opposition cries of fraud three weeks after election day. Hernandez, Honduras’ first president to seek a second term in office, won by 50,446 votes, according to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). The TSE reported that Hernandez received 42.95 percent of the vote,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1176,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions\/1176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}