Reduced Expectations

Today the Supreme Election Tribunal (TSE) began setting expectations about voter turnout for the election in Honduras. They also began better explaining the discrepancies in the number of voters on the official voting list, versus the population numbers for Honduras.

Adrienne Pine, over on Quotha, observed that something about the 4.6 million person official voting list, and the 7.6 million person official population just didn't add up. Today, Saul Escobar, president of the TSE, admitted that the real voting census is 3.4 million, but that there are an additional 1 million registered voters outside the country. The voters in the exterior have not come out to vote in the last two elections.

Escobar's number of 3.4 million is 44.7% of the population. However, to complicate things, an El Heraldo article from yesterday tells us that 49.3% of the population (3,737,976 persons) are under 18, the legal voting age, leaving 50.7% (3,844,125 persons) over 18, and a total population of 7,582,101. The missing 444,000 voters presumably are the disenfranchised who are not registered to vote. If Escobar is correct and there are around 1 million registered voters outside the country, the true population of Hondurans is more than 8.6 million, but unknown.

The de facto government has been calling for a massive turnout. In 2005, the turnout was 56%. That was the lowest turnout since the 1982 constitution entered into effect. Today the TSE began to set our expectations for how massive a turnout to expect.

Roberto Micheletti said that he had information there would be an 80% turnout. The TSE president, Saul Escobar, expects a 60% turnout, slightly higher than the 2005 election, but hardly massive. Anonymous TSE officials told another La Tribuna reporter that they expected between 2 million and 2.4 million voters, or, at best, 52.6% turnout, which would be even lower than the 2005 election. This official said, "it would be bad if we barely got over a million voters, but we hope for at least 2 million, a number similar to the 2005 election."

So the TSE is reducing our expectations for voter turnout, from slightly better than the last election, to slightly worse than the last election.