News Release

Evidence of Honduran Election Being Stolen

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Al Jazeera reports: “Honduras’ beleaguered elections commission officially declared incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez as president-elect on Sunday amid ongoing opposition cries of fraud three weeks after election day.” See Twitter list on Honduras for updates.

SILVIO CARRILLO, silvio.carrillo at gmail.com, @justiceforberta
Carrillo just wrote the New York Times op-ed “America’s Blind Eye to Honduras’s Tyrant.” He is a film and news producer and the nephew of Berta Cáceres, a Honduran activist who was assassinated there last year after being awarded the Goldman Prize for her environmental activism.

SUYAPA PORTILLO, lavidagris at gmail.com, @SuyapaPV, Skype: solentiname74
Portillo observed the election in Honduras. She is an assistant professor at Pitzer College and organized “An Open Letter to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa on the Crisis in Honduras” — just published by CounterPunch and signed by over 200 academics.

MARK WEISBROT, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net, @ceprdc
Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He said in a statement: “It is now clear to the experts who have looked at the results that there is no statistically plausible explanation for the sudden and drastic shift in the vote count that took place after the majority of votes were counted. This election has little credibility, either among most Hondurans, or internationally at this point.”

The group elaborated: “The TSE’s [Tribunal Supremo Electoral] initial count of 57 percent of tally sheets on election night showed a five-point lead for opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla. The TSE system then mysteriously went offline for over 30 hours, and when it returned, the voting trends sharply reversed, eroding Nasralla’s lead until Hernández ended up with a 1.7-percentage-point lead over Nasralla, with all tally sheets counted. The results contradicted earlier public statements by one of the TSE magistrates, Marcos Ramiro Lobo Rosales, that 70 percent of tallies had been counted, and that Nasralla had an insurmountable lead.

“An analysis of the vote tabulation by Dr. Irfan Nooruddin of Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, prepared for the OAS, found that the sharp change in voting trends following the TSE’s mysterious system failure was improbable.”

KAREN SPRING, [in Honduras] spring.kj at gmail.com, @hondurassol
Spring is the Honduras-based coordinator for the Honduras Solidarity Network, a network of over 30 organizations from the U.S. and Canada. She said today: “International media attention has glossed over the popular resistance in the streets of Honduras and the ensuing violent crackdowns and human rights violations committed by [government] forces. The voices of people and grassroots groups involved in the road blocks, protests, and resistance all over the country are being ignored.”