By Laura Garcia, Diego Oré and Emily Green
TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Honduran centrist presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla maintained a small lead over Trump-backed conservative Nasry Asfura on Wednesday, when a technical problem delayed the fourth day of vote-counting.
With 79.97% of votes counted, the Liberal Party’s Nasralla held 40.27%, just over 14,000 votes ahead of the National Party’s Asfura, who had 39.68%. Rixi Moncada of the ruling leftist LIBRE Party was well behind in third place with 19.01%.
System outages have beset the impoverished Central American nation’s fiercely contested election since it took place on Sunday, and U.S. President Donald Trump, who has strongly backed Asfura, has alleged election fraud, without providing evidence.
The delay in updating the vote tallies on Wednesday was the second such stoppage, with members of the electoral council blaming the company behind the tabulating platform for the outages.
The Honduran presidency is decided in a single round, and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if the margin is narrow or they fall short of an absolute majority.
Wednesday’s halt was due to system maintenance that was done without proper notice, electoral council official Cossette Lopez-Osorio said on X, adding she considered it “inexcusable.”
Nasralla remained confident despite the problems, writing on X: “Either way we’re going to win.”
Election observers from the European Union and the Organization of American States as well as Honduras’ electoral authority have called for calm and patience as the final votes are counted.
Early preliminary results released on Monday had originally shown Asfura with a slim lead of some 500 votes. Election organizers declared a “technical tie” and said votes would have to be counted by hand. When the count was updated on Tuesday, Nasralla had swung to a narrow lead.
The electoral authority later said a problem with the initial rapid count had failed to process 20% of the votes.
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington-based think tank that promotes democracy, said Trump’s comments and accusations against Asfura’s rivals had undoubtedly had an impact.
Trump’s threat to cut funding if Asfura did not win “would be considered likely to cause economic harm to Honduras and its people,” he said.
On Monday night, Trump said on his Truth Social account that Honduras was “trying to change the results of their Presidential Election.”
“If they do there will be hell to pay! The people of Honduras voted in overwhelming numbers on November 30th.”
Moncada, the ruling party candidate, told Telesur on Wednesday that the vote transmission system was flawed and criticized it as lacking transparency.
Referring to Trump’s accusations of fraud, which she said violated international protocols, Moncada said this marked “a direct intervention that affects the interests of the Honduran people.”
President Xiomara Castro of the LIBRE Party was barred from running again because Honduras’ constitution restricts the president to serving only one four-year term.
(Reporting by Laura Garcia in Tegucigalpa and Diego Ore in Mexico City; editing by Stephen Eisenhammer, Brendan O’Boyle, Alistair Bell and Cynthia Osterman)
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.