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

Rafael Alegria: 65-70% Abstention Nationwide.

Radio Globo is reporting turnout from different polling places. Each polling place has about 300 names. In Tegucigalpa, turnout was varying between 30 and 45 percent according to heads of polling places. Radio Globo's reporters found that in some of those polling places outside of Tegucigalpa are reporting turnouts of 17-42 voters per polling place, so far today, with fewer than 30 minutes left to vote. Similar numbers in San Pedro and La Lima. Since the official story is that turnout is "massive" it will be fun to see the "official" numbers. The informal ones are quite an education.

Rafael Alegria, a leader of the Frente de Resistencia, is saying on Radio Globo, that their census of voter turnout suggests that anywhere from 65-70% of the electorate stayed home and did not vote today.