Was There Fraud in Honduras’ Election?

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to electoral fraud in Honduras’ presidential election. Yet neither the opposition nor international electoral observers have conclusively demonstrated that such has occurred. In other words, there is a lot of gun smoke in the room, but no smoking gun.

Perhaps the most damning piece of circumstantial evidence so far is a statistical analysis by Georgetown professor Irfan Noorudin at the request of the Organization of American States (OAS). It demonstrates that:

The Honduran national election of 2017 experienced a dramatic vote swing away from the opposition alliance and towards the incumbent National Party. This analysis raises doubts about the plausibility of such a reversal of fortunes. If one believes the vote tallies to be accurate, it is plausible to have such a swing. But the pattern of votes, particularly in turnout rates, is suspicious. As documented above, there’s a marked break in the data that is hard to explain as pure chance.

Noorudin firmly concludes: “On the basis of this analysis, I would reject the proposition that the National Party won the election legitimately.”

Partly based on this analysis, the OAS Electoral Observation Mission in Honduras stated it could not be certain about the validity of the results. OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro has called for a new election.

But despite how compelling Noorudin’s analysis is, there is still a missing link that he mentions: the vote tallies from polling stations. Up until now, neither the opposition nor international observers have presented evidence showing that the vote tallies were systematically altered.

Given the magnitude of the alleged fraud—a little over 50,000 votes to swing the election—one would expect that during the recount the international observers would have discovered plenty of evidence of how vote tallies were tampered with or did not match the amount of votes registered in each ballot box. While the OAS found irregularities in a “small number” of vote tallies, it does not mention anything significant enough to change the result.

Thus, all the suspicion lies on how the computer system went down when opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was ahead with 57% of vote tallies counted and the subsequent dramatic (and statistically implausible) swing in favor of president Juan Orlando Hernández. However, the results announced by the Electoral Tribunal are ultimately backed up by physical vote tallies from each polling station.

And that is the conundrum: Either widespread fraud was conducted with surgical precision up to a point where a multitude of international observers cannot conclusively prove that it happened, or the statistically implausible actually happened and Hernández won the election fairly.