Low Voter Turnout in US

La Tribuna carried a report on Supreme Electoral Tribunal's reported voting numbers for the United States, and the numbers are low. Voting was first permitted in the US in the 2001 election. Here's what La Tribuna reported yesterday:

Poririo Lobo Sosa		1881
Elvin Santos		820
Others		28
Total		2729

However, the La Tribuna article says the TSE reported 2841 total votes from the United States. That leaves 112 votes unaccounted for, likely spoiled and null. The TSE says there are nearly 19,000 registered voters in the US, according to the article, giving an 84% abstention rate.

So how does this compare with previous presidential elections where voting has been allowed in the US? The TSE website confirms that in the 2005 election, there were 464 votes in the US out of 11, 510 registered voters (95% abstention). In contrast, in 2001, the first year voting was allowed in the US, there were 4,541 votes cast out of an electoral role of 10,826 ( 55% abstention). Remember the 1.2 million voters the TSE wanted to eliminate from the electoral rolls to increase the apparent turnout, the voters who were largely supposed to be in the US? Apparently they never managed to get re-registered to vote in the US for this election.

It's official: Lobo elected, turnout under 50%

AFP reports in Spanish from an hour ago that the official winner of the November Honduran presidential vote is Porfirio Lobo Sosa, credited with 56% of the vote (1.2 million votes).

As the article notes, Lobo's election is largely unrecognized, although of course, US recognition is probably the most important to him. More important, as AFP notes, some countries will condition their recognition on what happens before Lobo's inauguration: if he takes power from the de facto regime, he may still face a lack of recognition:

Up to now, only the US, Costa Rica, Panama and Peru have recognized the elections, although other countries, such as Chile, are analyzing whether to take that step after January 27, depending on how the transfer of power goes.

[hasta ahora sólo Estados Unidos, Costa Rica, Panamá y Perú han reconocido las elecciones, aunque otros países, como Chile, analizan dar ese paso luego del 27 de enero, dependiendo de cómo se dé el traspaso de poder]

Even the countries in Central America that have already said they will recognize the election are making demands that Lobo is not able to satisfy:

Costa Rica and Panama have asked Lobo to seek the resignation of the de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, as a way to achieve international recognition, but the latter has said that he does not plan to leave before the 27th of January.

[Costa Rica y Panamá han pedido a Lobo que busque la renuncia del presidente de facto Roberto Micheletti, como una forma de lograr reconocimiento internacional, pero éste ha dicho que no planea irse antes del 27 de enero.]

And of course, as we have documented in a previous post, and as reported by the AFP, the final turnout-- which does matter internationally as a measure of legitimacy-- was less the 50%.

So, enjoy your new status, President-elect Lobo...

100.07% And Still Counting

The Tribunal Supremo Electoral's website reporting results started off today reporting that 100.03 percent of the vote had been counted. Upon returning to it later in the day, it now reports results at 100.07 percent! They say they won't declare the results official until at least Tuesday, December 23 but we can make some points now, even if the vote totals change a little later.

The TSE has now counted 2,297,465 votes for president, for a 49.94% turnout. This is almost exactly the percentage vote projected on election day by NDI-Hagamos Democracia. So much for the exaggerated claims of 62% voting. And so much for CNN's December 5 proclamation that their analysis indicated a 56.6% turnout.

For the record, compare this with the 55% voter turnout for the 2005 presidential election of José Manuel Zelaya Rosales reported by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. (The same source reported a level of 46% participation in Honduran congressional elections in 2005.)

There are 700,000 more voters on the official voting rolls today than in 2005, but only 107,000 more total votes were cast than in 2005. A variety of analysts have noted that the voter rolls probably include some names that should be purged, and have also pointed to limited opportunities for Hondurans abroad to vote. But even these effects would not justify claiming that the 2009 vote was "massive", the term used by the de facto regime and echoed in pro-election statements by other governments.

Spoiled and blank ballots each individually beat out any of the third party candidates by significant amounts. In the TSE final count, Porfirio Lobo is credited with 57%, Elvin Santos with 38%, and no other named candidate received more than 2%.

Spoiled and blank ballots constituted 155,584 of the total number of ballots this year. Some proportion of these are self-evidently votes of protest against the regime. For example, in the La Tribuna article noting the null/spoiled ballots, you'll see a picture of a spoiled ballot. Written across it are the words "Golpistas hijos de puta", definitely a protest vote. Carlos Romero, director of elections for the TSE lamented the large number of spoiled ballots since the TSE had invested 50 million lempiras ($2.6 million) in training the electoral officials and public education specifically to reduce the number of spoiled ballots.

Taking the spoiled and null ballots into account, there were just over 2.1 million valid votes counted, about what Boz expected if the downward trend in voting participation continued as it had over the last 5 elections.

This is far fewer valid votes than the 2.4 million Boz proposed would be needed for the golpistas to declare the election a solid endorsement of the coup. At the same time, it is far more than the 1.5 million valid votes that Boz argued would indicate the call to boycott elections had a major effect. Instead, the valid vote count falls in the middle ground between 1.7 and 2.3 million valid votes where Boz suggested both sides could claim victory, as indeed they have.

But by claiming "massive" voter turnout, now falsified by the TSE's own vote count; by trying to redefine the proportional turnout by arbitrarily deducting some number of voters they decided should not be counted; and by working so furiously to misrepresent the levels of participation; the de facto regime has shown that it felt it needed something far more definite than it got out of this election.

We would suggest that the relevant measure of whether this election met the expectations of the coup regime is somewhat different. Less than 50% of those listed as eligible voted in this election. Of that number, almost 7% turned in ballots that were blank or deliberately spoiled, meaning that the final presidential selection fell to about 43% of the electorate. The trend of alienation from governance that already existed in Honduras intensified with an election that was in no way free and fair.

The big difference this time: hundreds of thousands of people now count themselves as part of a resistance movement that will influence elections in the future. And that includes some large proportion of those who did not vote, or submitted spoiled or blank ballots, as well as those who stayed at home on election day. Porfirio Lobo has no mandate from the people, to add to his lack of influence in his own party and in Honduras' national government.

Arias, Clinton, Martinelli lobbying for Lobo Sosa

Oscar Arias confirmed yesterday that he got a phone call from Hillary Clinton concerning the need to get Porfirio Lobo Sosa recognized, and that he, in collaboration with Ricardo Martinelli, would be using technology to gather support for Lobo Sosa.

After a two hour meeting yesterday, Arias and Martinelli told Lobo Sosa they would do whatever is necessary to get the international community to recognize Lobo Sosa as president on January 27, 2010.

Costa Rica, Panama Call for Micheletti Resignation

The Presidents of Costa Rica and Panama, in meeting with Porfirio Lobo Sosa in San Jose today, told him that if he wants his government to be recognized on January 27, that he must convince the de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, to resign. Lobo must not receive power from that polemic de facto governor.

Oscar Arias and Ricardo Martinelli are presidents of the only two Central American countries that have agreed to recognize the results of the November 29 Honduran elections.

Mercosur Disavows Honduran Elections

The 38th Mercosur summit, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, has issued a statement Monday disavowing recognition of the Honduras elections. The presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela, which is seeking membership, "reaffirmed their strongest condemnation against the coup" of June 28 against Honduras' constitutional President Manuel Zelaya." Bloomberg reports the statement said:

“In light of the failure to restore President Jose Manuel Zelaya to the position for which he was democratically elected by the Honduran people, we want to express our total lack of recognition for the Nov. 29 elections held by the de facto government, which were undertaken in an unconstitutional, illegitimate and illegal atmosphere.”

The elections were held ""in a climate of unconstitutionality and illegality, being a strong blow to the democratic values of Latin America and the Caribbean."

Mexico was observing at the Mercosur summit. The Mexican Foreign Minister, Patricia Espinoza, said "the elections in Honduras are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the normalization of the democratic life in Honduras." She told the summit that Zelaya needed to be returned to power, and called for an end to the harrassment of the Brazilian Embassy.

Mercosur joins the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA in Spanish) in not recognizing the elections.

Brazil: No recognition. Period.

Remember the reports that claimed to parse a Brazilian press spokesman as contradicting President Lula da Silva's eloquent "No, no, no, adamantly, no" response to whether they would recognize the November 29 elections?

Well, as the New York Times reports today, that parsing is being firmly rejected:

The president's position is clear...Brazil does not intend to recognize a government elected in a process that was organized by an illegitimate government.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

But watch for others to focus on a different statement, one that supports the pragmatic claim that Brazil (and everyone else) simply will have to recognize the Lobo government:

One thing is dealing with the fact that there were elections and another is recognizing the legitimacy of the elections...And for now, Brazil does not recognize that legitimacy.

Rather than accept the "no, no, no..." or the first sentence I quoted above, expect others to emphasize the phrase "for now".

Whereas what I find interesting about this second quote is that Brazil, apparently, can tell the difference between recognizing that a voting exercise took place, and accepting that it was legitimate.

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.

Don't Go Changing....

To be blunt, the TSE is messing with us in order to tell the story about the election that the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti Bain wants the world to accept. The message, turnout was massive. The reality is quite a bit different, and the way they're playing the game is by changing the rules. Here's how it goes.

You will remember the night of the election there was confusion about the participation level of the populace of Honduras in voting. Saul Escobar, president of the TSE, came out and told us that 63 percent of the potential voters voted, whereas at the same press conference, they read the report of the independent NGO Hagamos Democracia, which found a participation level of 47 percent in its data. Where did that discrepancy come from? Many of us have been looking for the reason.

While previous press reports have described Hagamos Democracia as having a contract with the TSE, and described its methodology as being based on exit polling, neither turns out to be true.
According to Rolando Bú, coordinator of Hagamos Democracia, the only thing the TSE did was accredit them as election observers. They were not paid by the TSE to report; they are, in fact, and NGO, funded by various governments, including the United States.

Their methodology was to select a sample of 1173 mesas electorales from around the country based on criteria like their history of participation in previous elections and other criteria. In each of these mesas electorales, they established an observer who was present the whole time, from the time the polling place opened until it closed, and did not visit other mesas electorales as many election observers do. After the polling place closed, their election observer sent them the statistics from that mesa, including the tallied vote counts, and participation from the official "actas" that the TSE has reported to it to tally. Their observers also send in their own statistics gathered from their observations during the day.

In 2005 the TSE website said 2,190,398 people voted, from an electoral roll of 3,976,550 voters. According to Hagamos Democracia, 2,162,000 voted in 2009 from an electoral roll of 4.6 million. That's approximately 28,000 fewer people voting than voted in 2005, while the electoral roll increased by some 600,000 persons. The size of the electoral roll was supplied to Hagamos Democracia by the TSE prior to the election, and was the same number supplied to the press.

Bú told Tiempo that the TSE measured participation against a different electoral roll that was adjusted for emigration, deaths, etc, that the TSE did not share with them. Bú said that Hagamos Democracia was not adjusting the electoral roll for deaths and emigration because it did not have reliable enough information to do so.

To measure participation you need to know two things; how many people voted, and how many possible voters there were. In prior elections, including the 2005 election, participation was measured as a percentage of the whole electoral roll. For 2009, the TSE no longer wants to use the size of the electoral roll as registered, but rather some adjusted number that they're not publically releasing. This is transparent? For the TSE to measure against another value is disingenuous at best, and an attempt to deliberately mislead, at worst.

As I wrote this a correspondent wrote to tell me the TSE has recanted and now claims turnout was 49%. This was confirmed in an AFP story.

Mayoral Update San Pedro Sula

With 76.55 percent of the vote counted, here's how the mayoral race for San Pedro Sula stood late this afternoon. The numbers come from La Prensa's Minute by Minute column at 4:39 pm. With 911 of 1190 actas counted:

Candidate	number of votes	percent
Juan Carlos Zuniga	57,708	49.03
Tuky Bendaña	55,928	47.51
other/null	4,073	3.46
Totales	117,699	100.00

If this is 76.55% of the votes, it implies we should see about 153,754 votes in San Pedro Sula this year, or a turnout of about 30% of the (low ball) estimated 507,000 voters in San Pedro Sula.

On recognition and Brazil

As the vote count continues, with the official report of the final count now delayed until December 29, the question of recognition of the election faces those countries that said they would not do so, as well as those that said they would.

The US continues to express its position in the murkiest of language.

Brazil, in contrast, is crystal clear, yet today we see others suggesting a softening of the Brazilian position.

The stated Brazilian position remains that voting this Sunday was conducted under conditions that make it impossible to recognize the results, and that the restoral of the constitutional government illegally overthrown June 28 is non-negotiable.

So where are commentators seing room to negotiate the non-negotiable? in the suggestion that perhaps Zelaya can be forced into a nominal restoral just long enough to participate in the inauguration of Pepe Lobo.

Coverage of what Lula actually said at the Iberoamerican Summit doesn't support that interpretation: in fact, he restated that Brazil will not recognize the elections in Honduras or talk to the winner.

For this, it is best to look at original Portugese reporting. So here, I translate Lula's direct quotes from the Portugese.

Rejecting the attempt by Oscar Arias to put pressure on him by comparing recognizing the Honduran elections to recognizing those of Iran, Lula says:

Iran's president participated in the elections and won 62% of the votes, the Constitution was not violated. It is different from a person who committed a coup d'etat repudiated by all countries, by the OAS, which placed conditions set by the very same President of Costa Rica, which was the return to power of President Zelaya.

Show romanization

The coup worked cynically, convened elections for which it did not have a right. [They could have done things with greater normalcy, returned the president, called elections. The return to normality in Honduras all we want. The rest is this:]* You can not make concessions to a coup.

It is a matter of common sense, a matter of principle, we can not condone the politics of vandalism in Latin America.

*[material in brackets was not included in the source cited above, but was contained in the fuller version of these remarks published by Brazil's O Globo]

Commenting specifically on the situation of President Zelaya, Lula said he hoped Honduras would take the decision that would allow Zelaya to return to normalcy, adding

The best thing would be Zelaya back home, but you must have constitutional guarantees, of the government, of the OAS, and this has to happen rapidly.
[emphasis added]

Other analysts may try to spin Lula's remarks by taking note of the following comment while ignoring the rest of the statements, reported above:

This citizen [Pepe Lobo] has the right to take the steps he deems necessary. If something new happens, let's see, we'll wait. The problem now is much more of Honduras than of Brazil...

What does this mean?

First, Lula is clearly trying to keep separate Pepe Lobo and the authors of the coup d'etat. The election is illegitimate because it was convened by the coup government, which had no legal right to oversee this (and which cannot actually guarantee a free and fair election). But he is not condemning Lobo for participating in the election.

Second, by pointedly calling Lobo a "citizen" (which is the form of address the de facto regime uses in its references to President Zelaya, as a continual refusal to recognize his continued constitutional status) Lula is explicitly refusing to recognize him as president-elect. Lobo can do what he thinks necessary, he says, but we will wait. We'll see.

The problem is Honduras' problem because, as Lula's earlier statements make clear, unless there is rapid action to restore President Zelaya, he is not changing his position. To quote his response to questions at the Iberamerican summit:

Não, não, não, não. Peremptoriamente, não.

[No, no, no, no. Absolutely, no.]

In longer accounts of his comments in Brazilian media, Lula is very clear:

I can not decide now for what may happen next month or in two, three or four months

he said, asked specifically about "new things" that might affect his position,

But for now, the Brazilian position is not to accept the electoral process

Pretty clear, right?

Yet otherwise reliable commentators have suggested a modification, based on a statement attributed to Lula by Reuters UK:

Show romaniza

If something new happens, we can discuss it. For now, the (Brazilian) position is not to accept the electoral process in Honduras. A new thing (we could discuss) is for Zelaya to take over for the inauguration of the new president.

I could not find the original of this in Portugese, even in the longest interviews on the topic I have found reproduced, in which Lula emphatically reiterates that recognizing this election opens the door to future coups in Latin America. It should come right after the statements I reproduce and translate above.

I don't doubt Lula said this, or something close to it, perhaps in response to questioning. But it would seem like such a major change of position would have been featured in some of the original Portugese-language reporting.

And it is interesting that Reuters UK (now reproduced by the New York Times) left out all the rest of Lula's remarks that I translated above, in which he emphatically and repeatedly rejected recognition and called for the restoral of President Zelaya. And there is more in the same vein that I don't have time to collate and translate-- and you, dear reader, probably wouldn't have the patience to review.

What precisely Lula might have meant by Zelaya taking over for the inauguration of the new president is the question, one that for me requires the original language quote. A one-word error in translation could have changed a statement from "take over until the inauguration of the new president" ["for" is de; "until" is até, so this is an easy transcription error from spoken Portugege]. Calling for Zelaya to take over until the inauguration-- e.g. for the rest of his original term-- would be consistent with all the rest of the quotes from, supposedly, the very same interview.

Indeed, given that Lula is in this passage clarifying what might be a "new thing" that would change Brazil's firm position, I suspent whatever statement Reuters is translating followed closely from where he said "If something new happens, let's see, we'll wait". The implication there is clear: something "new" would be movement in Honduras to restore the President to office.

Watch for the storyline now to become some sort of brief restoration. But don't believe everything you read.

Please Brief Valenzuela

Will someone please bring Arturo Valenzuela, the State Department's new Assistant Secretary for West Hemisphere Affairs up to speed on the Honduran election history? He seems to not know the history surrounding this election. Today in his press conference, he said:

In fact, the primaries were held in November of last year in each of the major parties. The vice president, Santos, resigned. He was Zelaya’s vice president. He resigned as vice president to run for office. He competed in primaries in November of last year.

In fact Elvin Santos did NOT compete in the primaries last November. He was ruled ineligible by the Supreme Election Tribunal. I'll refer you to a previous post from August this year for all the details since it involves constitutional amendments.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal ruled in August 2008, that Santos could not be inscribed in the primary election as a presidential candidate because he was still the Vice President, and he then had to install a puppet candidate, Mauricio Villeda Bermudez, as a placeholder. He resigned as Vice President on November 18, 2008, just before the primary election, but it was not until December 17th, after his stand-in had won the primary election, that Santos's resignation was accepted by Congress, and the TSE ruled that as long as he resigned at least 6 months before the election he could run. Villeda Bermudez was convinced to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Santos. That's how Santos became a presidential candidate. He did not compete in the primary election.

Valenzuela also seems not to know that two of the magistrates appointed to the TSE this time were at the time of their appointment holding political office in violation of the constitution, which of course caused a stir in Honduras but was no impediment to their appointment.

There seems to be much deep background about the Honduran elections that Mr. Valenzuela doesn't appear to know. Will someone please brief him?

Numbers Dropping

Something interesting is happening as the official numbers trickle out of the TSE. You will remember that according to a Tiempo article from this morning, with 8,862 of 15,260 urns counted:

Candidate	number of votes
Porfirio Lobo	897,335
Elvin Santos	613,384
Bernardo Martinez	35.593
Felícito Avila	31,174
César Ham	29,006
Totales	1,605,442

This count, with 58.07% of the urns counted, yielded 1,605,442 valid votes, giving a straight-line projection of 2,764,666 valid votes in the whole election, for an expected number of 60% of the 4.6 million votes possible. That would agree with the otherwise unbelievable claim by the TSE that turnout would be over 60%, much higher than the 2005 election.

Now, we do not expect a perfect straight-line projection, since different districts can contribute different numbers of votes. But what has happened since is interesting and may come close to explaining why the TSE expected 60%+ turnout while the official exit polling group expected under 50%.

La Tribuna just reported a new set of numbers from the TSE in their Minute By Minute archive for today. This count is for 10,120 urns of the 15,260:

Candidate	number of votes
Porfirio Lobo	937,006
Elvin Santos	639,481
Bernardo Martinez	37,029
Felícito Avila	32,113
César Ham	30,334
Totales	1,675,511

This count, of 66.31% of the urns, yielded a total of 1,675,511 valid votes which projected forward would suggest 2,526,784 valid votes expected when all the urns are counted, or only about 54% of the 4.6 million voter electorate.

What seems to be happening is that the original projection of turnout, based on the returns from just a few central municipios, especially the area around Tegucigalpa, overestimated the turnout in the rest of the country.

As these additional ballot boxes are counted, the percentage of valid votes is decreasing, approaching the levels reported by the exit polling company, whose sample was from across all of Honduras. At the same time, the number of null and blank ballots counted, as a percentage is increasing (6.94% versus 6.3%).

Or: polling wins. But will it trump propaganda?

TSE and exit polls "Only differ in abstentionism"

To recap: last night, at the official TSE press conference, the exit polling service announced turnout projections of under 50%; while the TSE itself said they thought the turnout would be over 60%.

One does not even have to delve into the on-the-ground reports by international observers and resistance activists, who saw light turnout where they were watching polls, to worry about why the two TSE numbers are so far apart.

In an article this morning in Tiempo on the declaration of Pepe Lobo as winner, the second paragraph says that

En la presentación de los resultados se produjo una polémica porque mientras el Tribunal Supremo Electoral proclamó que el abstencionismo fue del 38. 7 por ciento, la Fundación Hagamos Democracia, que tiene un centro de cómputo similar al del organismo electoral, dijo que fue de 52. 4 por ciento.



[In the presentation of the results a controversy was produced because while the TSE proclaimed that abstentionism was 38.7%, the FHD, which has a center of computation similar to the electoral organism, said that it was 52.4%]

This is reporting on the same press conference we listened to live last night. The Fundación Hagamos Democracia is the exit polling entity in Honduras under contract to the TSE.

Later in the article Tiempo notes that

Ortez Sequeira leyó el informe de la Fundación Hagamos Democracia que establece que a esas alturas Porfirio Lobo Sosa tenía el 55. 72 por ciento de los votos frente a 38. 50 por ciento de Elvin Santos, resultados que a su juicio son similares a los del Tribunal Supremo Electoral y que únicamente difieren en el abstencionismo.



[Ortez Sequeira read the report of the FHD that established that at these levels Porfirio Lobo Sosa had 55.72 % of the votes against 38.5% for Elvin Santos, results that in his judgment are similar to those of the TSE and that they only differ in abstentionism.]

Well, duh.

So let's take a close look at the votes Tiempo reports, announced at the same time by the TSE:

Candidate	number of votes	percentage of total
Porfirio Lobo	897,335	52.29%
Elvin Santos	613,384	35.74%
Bernardo Martinez	35.593	2.07%
Felícito Avila	31,174	1.81%
César Ham	29,006	1.70%
Votos Blancos	42,998	2.51%
Votos Nulos	66,537	3.87%
Totales	1,716,027	100.00%

Take a good look here at the number of blank and null votes: 109,535 out of 1,716,027 reported; 6.38% of the votes cast are ambiguous, and this should include protest votes.

So the percentage of valid votes represents either 41.22% of the eligible voters (if we take the exit polling as our guide, and deduct the invalid votes) or 54.92% (if we take the declared turnout estimate of the TSE, which international media have accepted, and again, deduct the invalid votes).

We would suggest people need to look carefully and skeptically at the real vote counts as they come in.

By people, we mean scholars and interested public, obviously, not the US State Department, which would recognize the election no matter what.

While Tiempo has been the sole newspaper abstaining from pro-coup reporting, it is not pro-resistance either; it seems genuinely to be trying to uphold some ideal of reliable journalism.

What the election results reported there are telling us is that, far from transparent, the more than 60% participation rate the TSE wants us to circulate (which differs from their official polling agency's estimate of under 50%-- which would be in keeping with normal expectations, given previous trends) has to be looked at skeptically.

It is good propaganda: but it literally is unbelievable.

Mayoral race in San Pedro Sula

San Pedro Sula, a city with an estimated population of 1 million to 1.5 million people, voted for a new mayor yesterday.

In a 1 million person population we'd expect 50.7 % to be of voting age, or 507,000 eligible voters, according to the TSE's own statements about the Honduran population. So what actually happened in San Pedro Sula, where yesterday there was public demonstration against the coup, and police repression of these demonstrators and of independent radio?

Expected turnout for San Pedro Sula, using the TSE's claim late Sunday of 61.3% participation, would be something like 307,ooo votes.

At 10 PM, the TSE's presidential vote tally had supposedly covered 61.86% of the votes.

Checking the math there to be sure this percentage is accurate, the reported total counted at that point of 1.716 million presidential ballots out of 4.6 million eligible voters of whom 61.3% were expected to vote matches this claimed percentage counted fairly well.

Unless something odd happened, we might thus expect that reports of other races at the same time would include the majority of the votes cast.

Yet La Prensa, last evening, in its Minute By Minute column, reported on far fewer than 100,000 votes for mayor of San Pedro Sula at the same time.

The results presented last night, on the basis of which the election for mayor was called, were:

Juan Carlos Zuniga (Liberal party) 33,185
Tuky Bendaña (Nationalist party) 29,796

This is a total of 62,981 votes.

Unless you want to claim that fewer people voted for Mayor than voted for President--the opposite of which was true in the last election-- the implication is that turnout in San Pedro was heading to be somewhat less than the 307,000 voters the TSE turnout estimates would claim.

How would San Pedro's reported numbers match up to the more modest (and we think, more believable) turnout estimates of the official exit polling? Remember that they said participation rates were just 47.6% of eligible voters.

This would lead us to expect ca. 240,000 voters in San Pedro Sula yesterday.

If the same proportion of votes were counted in San Pedro Sula by 10 PM, then we would expect something like 150,000 votes to have been reported.

Let's go further, and assume the registered level of null and void votes as were seen nationally (6.38%); we still would have expected to see about 140,000 votes reported.

Now, maybe they count the votes from the other races differently, or more slowly, or the precincts sampled for the national election somehow under-represent voting in San Pedro Sula.

But we will be watching to see what the final vote for mayor of San Pedro Sula actually is. And we suggest this kind of attention to local races will be well worthwhile for others as well.

State's Rich Fantasy Life

The US State Department has weighed in on the election results in Honduras this morning, and indeed there are no surprises here.

Honduran Election

Ian Kelly
Department Spokesman
Washington, DC
November 29, 2009

We commend the Honduran people for peacefully exercising their democratic right to select their leaders in an electoral process that began over a year ago, well before the June 28 coup d'etat. Turnout appears to have exceeded that of the last presidential election. This shows that given the opportunity to express themselves, the Honduran people have viewed the election as an important part of the solution to the political crisis in their country.

Except that the turnout appears not to have exceeded the turnout in 2005, according to the TSE's own firm hired to make the statistical projections and do exit polling. They report a turnout of 47.6% versus the TSE's claim of a 61.3% turnout. Their report has a 2% confidence interval (accurate at 98% level) whereas the TSE's claim is just an assertion, with no numbers presented to back it up. Both sets of results were presented at the 10 pm TSE press conference, but notice who the State Department decided to listen to.

The Honduran people overwhelmingly expressed themselves. Forced democracy where they could not choose candidates who represented them was not the solution for them. It was status-quo or "no go" and they didn't go in droves, despite the State Department's blind eye. Anyone who thinks the election resolved anything in Honduras is naive.

We look forward to continuing to work with all Hondurans and encourage others in the Americas to follow the lead of the Honduran people in helping advance national reconciliation and the implementation of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord. Significant work remains to be done to restore democratic and constitutional order in Honduras, but today the Honduran people took a necessary and important step forward.

One wonders what fantasy world the State Department lives in that the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord will ever be implemented. I hate to tell you, but its dead. The ink wasn't even dry on the signatures when Thomas Shannon publicly agreed to recognize the results of the elections no matter what, nailing its coffin shut. You've made half-hearted efforts to resurrected it, but you're not Merlin. Its not going to come back to life.

So what's the likely US policy going forward? We've now recognized the sham election where exit polling suggests that fewer than half of the electorate actually participated. If the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord is dead and buried, as I contend, then I can only see the State Department returning to its practical, unprincipled stand, exemplified by Lew Anselem's comments on the elections, and a swift return to the status quo, a complete white-wash and acceptance of a 21rst century coup by our government. What a sad bunch of politicians.

TSE announces 61.3% Participation; other estimates range lower

(Corrected at 8 AM EST) The Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) headed by Saul Escobar, reported in national broadcast at 10:00 pm, that turnout was 61.3%. He also reported they had preliminary, unaudited, results, from about 8,600 polling places (out of 15,300), that they had counted 1.7 million votes for all offices so far.

However, these were unaudited results because the system they had set up to verify the numbers transmitted by cell phone, which appears to have been to make a digital recording of the call, failed, so they have not been able to check that the numbers digitized and entered into the vote counting computers matched the numbers called in by the various polling places.

The TSE is spinning this turnout as just what you would expect given the recent trends, which they said was in line with a 6% per election decline in each of the last several elections, even though this is a supposed increase.

Already, La Prensa reports in their Minute by Minute column a turnout of 61.3 % which would be an increase, not a decrease, from the previous election. This would lead one to expect approximately 2.8 million votes.

So, what does this mean in terms of legitimacy of the election and effectiveness of the call for boycott by the Frente de Resistencia? Even by the TSE's numbers, which are unaudited and preliminary, and don't match with press reports, that's a 38.7% abstention rate.

The TSE had hired a polling firm to do exit polling. They presented a report the TSE conference as well. They sampled 1000 polling places (of the 15300) and reported only a 47.6% participation rate (at a 98% confidence level). This report is more in line with what the Frente de Resistencia. The polling firm further reported they saw a 7% decline in voting over 2005. The results reported by the TSE are based on their sample precincts.

Thus we can expect a great deal of interpretation being projected into the void.

El Tiempo, in a story projecting Pepe Lobo as winner, reported that the TSE had counted 570,954 votes from 4159 polling places "selected strategically to have the tendency in all the country". This is a sample of 27.2% of the planned polling places. While it would not scale directly (since other polling places could have larger numbers of voters) it is curious to see 1/3 of the polls yield only 500,000 votes, and still have claims for 62% turnout, which would project 2.8 million votes overall.

This would be implied by the turnout estimate Bloomberg reports, citing TSE magistrate Danny Matamoros (although it is unclear when Matamoros made this statement, whether before the 10 PM announcement over radio that we report on here, or after). Matamoros is widely quoted as claiming long lines of voters led to the indelible ink running out, which makes him seem rather invested in portraying this as a huge electoral turnout. As in most elections, we are likely to need to wait sometime for official figures, and meanwhile, unofficial claims will likely be taken up and repeated as if they were established facts.

The next thing to watch for are reports of the differences between votes cast and valid votes, to detect any effect from deliberate null voting.

For now, if the TSE's approved exit polling projection reported at 10 PM can be taken at face value (rather than the unsupported claim made at the same time), there was no massive turnout of Honduran voters yearning to use the ballot box to move beyond the coup. At best, there was a continuation of the long-established gradual discouragement of eligible voters about the worth of voting, which we have previously suggested is itself a kind of unorganized protest against elected government.

But it is also reasonable to propose that there was a measurable effect from the campaign to boycott the vote, whether we use Boz's numbers (and say that about 100,000 voters stayed home in protest) or suggest a different target number would have been reasonable in such a politicized election year.

That the results would favor Porfirio Lobo was never in question. The actual numbers are unvailable on the TSE website as of 8 am this morning, and the website for vitural observers that gave access to the cameras, is not broadcasting images of the count.

So much for the TSE's promise that they had a triple backup system that would prevent any delays in delivering the results. They made the results official without having actually successfully counted the votes.
RNS and RAJ