Honduran Candidate Claims Fraud After Trump-Backed Opponent Is Declared Victor

Hondurans awoke Christmas Day to the risk of political unrest, as a presidential candidate disputed the election results after weeks of vote counting and fraud claims.

A day earlier, Honduran election officials declared Nasry Asfura, a former mayor endorsed by President Donald Trump, as the president-elect of the Central American nation of 10 million.

Salvador Nasralla, a famous sportscaster, game show host and four-time presidential candidate, contested that conclusion, claiming that some contested votes from the election held last month had still not been counted, despite days of reviews of disputed tally sheets.

In an interview with The New York Times, Nasralla, a right-wing politician, appeared torn between fighting for his votes and his fear of empowering the governing leftist party, Libre, which has called for the election to be annulled entirely.

“I’m in a dilemma,” he said. “I would like to appeal, because almost 2 million people voted for me.” But, he said, “I don’t want to encourage the communists.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Nasralla said he would not ask Hondurans to take to the streets, recalling the protests after a contested election in 2017 that turned deadly. Those protesters were supporting Nasralla, who had run and lost against Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president recently pardoned by Trump in a U.S. drug case.

When Honduran election officials declared Asfura the winner on Christmas Eve, they said that a review of more than 98% of the tally sheets showed it was “arithmetically impossible” for Nasralla to prevail. The official tally had Asfura winning the three-way race by 27,000 votes, or less than 1 percentage point, with just over 40% of the vote.

If Nasralla does formally contest the result, he is on a strict clock. Honduran law gives him three business days to file an appeal. If he misses that deadline, the results cannot be challenged.

Honduras’ electoral court — which is made up of three magistrates, each aligned with one of the nation’s three major political parties — has up to 45 days to decide a challenge. But Asfura is scheduled to be sworn in as president on Jan. 27, and a pending challenge would not prevent him from taking office.

This month, the U.S. State Department revoked the visas of one of the court’s magistrates, Mario Morazán, who represents the governing Libre party, claiming that he was “undermining democracy in Honduras by impeding the vote count.”

To have an election annulled, Honduran law requires a candidate to prove widespread or structural fraud that changed the outcome, rather than just isolated errors.

Nasralla has alleged such fraud, claiming forged documents and altered tally sheets. While his primary legal path lies with the electoral justice system, he could also seek a political solution through Honduras’ Congress.

It appears unlikely that he will receive any international assistance. Trump publicly endorsed Asfura days before the vote, saying that if the right-wing candidate did not win, “the United States will not be throwing good money after bad” in Honduras.

When early returns showed Nasralla in the lead, Trump quickly suggested fraud, without offering any evidence. “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,” he said online. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”

But when Asfura pulled into the lead and was eventually declared the winner after a weeklong manual count of many tally sheets, U.S. officials quickly congratulated him and urged the parties to move on, despite the votes disputed by Nasralla.

Nasralla directed his ire at the United States, arguing that by dropping support for him, Washington had condemned Honduras to return to the status of a “narco-government” under the shadow of former President Hernández, who he fears will control his opponent’s party.

“The United States has set Honduras back 15 years,” he told the Times. “It has put Honduras back at the epicenter of drug trafficking in Latin America.”

There was briefly a sign that the Organization of American States, the main multilateral regional body, might support a challenge to the results.

Its leader, Albert Ramdin, said in an online post at about 3:30 p.m. Honduras time on Wednesday that the group was “aware of the difficulties experienced during the electoral process, recognizes the work carried out by Honduran institutions, and regrets that the full recount of the votes cast by citizens has not yet been completed.”

Minutes later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted that all parties should “respect ​the confirmed ​results” and “ensure a peaceful transition of authority ​to President-Elect Nasry Asfura.”

The U.S. mission to the OAS then followed up with a post congratulating Asfura, adding that Hondurans had “exercised their right to democratically elect their future leaders.”

Within two hours, the OAS issued a statement that “it did not identify any decisive fraudulent elements and considers that the declared results reflect the will expressed by the citizenry.” Ramdin followed up with a post congratulating Asfura.