Honduras ballots to be checked as election crisis simmers

Honduran electoral authorities on Tuesday offered to verify nearly a third of ballots cast in a disputed presidential poll held more than a week ago, in an effort to head off a deepening crisis in the gang-infested central American country.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal called on the leftwing opposition to provide documents it said it possessed suggesting around 5,100 ballots had been tampered with in the November 26 election.

The concession to the opposition came a day after hundreds of police revolted against an order to impose a curfew -- part of a state of emergency ordered by incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Their refusal to follow orders, which stretched into Tuesday, showed that Hernandez's authority could be crumbling.

Thousands of people have staged demonstrations in defiance of the state of emergency.

"The only path possible" to quell the crisis was for the claims of voter fraud to be rigorously checked, said the head of the election observer mission from the Organization for American States, Jorge Quiroga.

Hernandez made his re-election bid on the strength of a controversial 2015 Supreme Court ruling that overturned a constitutional ban on more than one presidential term.

That generated a backlash that saw the opposition's candidate -- a 64-year-old TV-presenter-turned-politician, Salvador Nasralla -- cause an upset in the election.

Initially, Nasralla emerged with an early lead, but that was whittled down and then reversed after a much-delayed counting of ballots that the opposition alleged was marred by fraud.

Protests that followed turned violent in some places, and a teenage girl was killed in one clash, her family said, blaming the police who responded by saying they were investigating.

The rebellious police, many of them members of an anti-riot unit called the "Cobras," went into the street in the capital Tegucigalpa late Monday to show their rejection of the order. Locals applauded their presence.

"The truth is we don't want to fight the people any more," one of the officers said, declining to give his name and his face hidden by a ski mask.

- Inconclusive election -

The inconclusive election has left Honduras -- a nation of 10 million beset by gang violence, corruption and poverty -- in the grips of its worst crisis since 2009, when then-president Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup, partly because of a perception he wanted to lift the one-mandate term limit.
On Monday, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said the final ballot count showed Hernandez with 42.98 percent of the vote, barely ahead of Nasralla with 41.39 percent.

But it declined to name an election winner, saying appeals could yet be lodged.

Nasralla told AFP he "cannot accept anything," and refused to recognize the tribunal's count.

A coordinator for a group of European Union poll observers, Marisa Matias, urged the tribunal to hold off on naming a winner, saying "the electoral process is far from finished."

Going into the election, Hernandez, a 49-year-old lawyer, enjoyed implicit backing from the United States, which is pouring $750 million into Central America's so-called Northern Triangle -- the poor, gang-infested trio of nations made up of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala -- to try to stem migration from the region into the US.

Source:AFP