Responses to the Coup d'etat in Honduras on Sunday June 28, with special emphasis on producing English-language versions of commentaries by Honduran scholars and editorial writers and addressing the confusion encouraged by lack of basic knowledge about Honduras.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Keeping Them Honest

The TSE continues to play fast and loose with the numbers as it speaks in public and represents the election results to the press. On their election results website, they list a total of 2,080,959 votes counted, which they say is 90.52% of the votes. This would project as a total of 2.3 million votes (2,298,894 votes). However, in comments to the press here, Enrique Ortez Sequeira, a TSE magistrate, says that they've counted 2.3 million votes, and that there will be 2.5 million votes total, a record for Honduras.

By the way, this would be a participation rate of 47.8 percent, or exactly what the Hagamos Democracia projections said the turnout was, not the 63% they initially announced, or the revised 49% they released late last week. Looks like a victory for statistics and sampling.

There are approximately 5,000 ballot boxes out of 45,000 that are problematic, where people forgot to sign forms, or put the forms inside the ballot box before sealing it up, which the TSE has not yet opened or counted, but will examine today. Ortez Sequeira says they could finish them up today.

Meanwhile, in the TSE counting center, in the Marriot Hotel in Tegucigalpa, the computers had network problems yesterday and could not talk to each other, so no work was done between 9 am and 2 pm when the network came back up. Its rumored that networking problems are what prevented the TSE from delivering its initial count on election night.

More than 80 mayoral races have already demanded recounts, as have 23 races for Congress.

6 comments:

Oscar said...

I wonder if there is a misplaced comma in paragraph 3. Should it be 5,000 ballot boxes, out of 45,000, that are problematic? Or as it stands, that there are 45,000 problematic boxes, 5,000 of which where people forgot to sign forms, etc.?

Unknown said...

I agree with you on this as well.

RNS said...

That's 5,000 problematic ballot boxes. I removed the comma.

Anonymous said...

You might be interested in reports of turnoyt from individual polling places, which Axis of Logic has posted, RNS.

Personally, I suspect that the turnout of high 40% is also inflated. My SWAG is more like 40-45%, and I wouldn't even rule out 35%. But 50% seems to contradict what we believe we know from the polls.

--Charles

Nuisance Man said...

Sounds like the lower, 2.3 million total vote projection based on the website is more likely to be true. Why trust what they say to the media? They've been lying all along. And why would a lower count even appear if it wasn't true?

If the total ends up at 2.3 million votes, that would be a participation rate of 44%. That's a lot worse than 48 or 49%, which would explain why they're still lying and spinning.

The Real News has a great report about the election, detailing the huge advantage the golpistas have reaped from convincing the world, even for a few days, that their election had a high turnout:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4573

RNS said...

Charles, I can unfortunately only work from the data I have, which is what they publish on their website (though I'll ask Rodolfo for the data used by Axis of Logic). What will be interesting for me is to look at the voting department by department, which I hope to do when the vote is finally released later this week.

Their public statements seldom match the actual numbers, but they need to keep up the "spin" that it was a good turnout in order to hype Porfirio Lobo's legitimacy. I want to keep them semi-honest about the meaning of their own numbers.