Honduras election tied, ex-president freed from US jail

Election workers in Honduras are counting votes by hand, with the two presidential candidates, Nasry Asfura and Salvador Nasralla, still in a virtual tie two days after an election marked by U.S. intervention.

While the count continues, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party was released Monday from a U.S. prison where he was serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking and firearms charges, according to Federal Bureau of Prisons records.

His release came after US President Donald Trump urged Honduran voters to vote for National Party candidate Asfura and said he would pardon Hernandez.

A White House official confirmed Tuesday that Trump pardoned Hernandez.

Preliminary results released Monday show the Liberal Party’s Asfura and Nasralla receiving just under 40 percent of the vote, with Asfura ahead by just 515 votes.

Rixi Moncada of the ruling LIBRE Party came in third place with 19 percent of the votes.

The electoral college declared the race a “technical tie” by a razor-thin margin.

The body’s president, Ana Paola Hall, appealed for calm and patience as election workers move into the slower phase of verifying vote counts by hand.

Preliminary results are based on counts transmitted digitally by polling stations across the country.

Trump claimed in a social media post on Monday that Honduras was “trying to change the results of the Presidential Election.”

Trump said on the Truth Social platform: “If they do this, there will be a heavy price! The people of Honduras voted overwhelmingly on November 30.” he said.

Sunday’s election was peaceful across the country, with high voter turnout, according to the Organization of American States, which is monitoring the vote.

In a statement on Monday, it said it could “confirm that the voting proceeded normally, apart from isolated incidents in some municipalities of the country.”

However, there are concerns that if vote counting takes a long time, the busy election environment could lead to protests and possible violence.

Frustration with the vote was compounded by problems Monday with the online portal where the results were supposed to be updated.

The website remained down for a long time as local media and politicians criticized the outage.

The election body said in a statement Tuesday that it had noticed the problems and that the company responsible for the system had notified it that there were issues that meant some ballots were still not being processed.

The CNE, the so-called electoral authority, said it would now release information about the count directly to the media and political parties to ensure the public can follow the results.

Former president Manuel Zelaya, who is also the husband of current President Xiomara Castro, harshly criticized Trump’s interference in the election, saying on X that it was an attempt to stop Moncada’s bid and promising that the Honduran people would stand up for democracy.

“We who fight for freedom are standing,” he wrote.

“We are patriots and no one bows down.”

On Monday evening, Moncada said the election was “still not lost” and claimed other parties were manipulating the process.

He also condemned US interference in the elections.

In a series of social media posts, Trump backed Asfura, the 67-year-old former mayor of Tegucigalpa, and said he could work with him in the fight against drug trafficking.

He accused Moncada of being a “communist”.