Honduras Plunges Into Post-Election Turmoil as Electoral Official Alleges “Monumental Fraud”

A member of Honduras’s electoral authority says deliberate manipulation and internal sabotage compromised the general election vote—complicating a razor-thin race marred by U.S. interference.

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An election poll worker counts the votes for each presidential candidate as they are pulled out of the ballot box and read out loud on Nov. 30, 2025 in Tocoa, Honduras (Photo provided by author).

Days removed from Sunday’s presidential vote, and still without a clear winner, Honduras’s post-election crisis became more contentious after a member of the country’s electoral authority denounced “monumental electoral fraud” on Thursday evening.

Marlon Ochoa, a representative for the Libre Party on the three-member National Electoral Council (CNE), alleged coordinated and deliberate electoral fraud carried out by the other council members, Cossette Alejandra López-Osorio of the National Party and Ana Paola Hall of the Liberal Party.

The CNE had claimed in a social media post on Tuesday that the delays in election results were due to technical issues. Two members of the council criticized Grupo ASD S.A.S, the company behind the Transmission and Dissemination of Election Results reporting system (known as TREP), for carrying out software modifications without the unanimous authorization of the council plenary.

But on Thursday, after repeated downtime of the TREP system continued to prevent the public from accessing real-time updates, the Honduran Center for Democracy Studies (CESPAD) issued an alert calling on CNE to take action.

López-Osorio and Hall represent the country’s traditional political parties, both of which were relegated to opposition status when Xiomara Castro won the general election for Libre in 2021. Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party has likewise alleged that irregularities may be affecting the results.

In a letter, Ochoa alleged manipulation of the results-transmission system as well as obstruction from within the state’s electoral authority. Ochoa said the TREP suffered deliberate failures, including disabled biometric checks, altered digital tally sheets, unexplained vote transfers, and the 40-hour retention of more than 16,000 tally sheets, which created massive discrepancies he claims total nearly one million votes. With the entire vote-processing chain compromised, he concluded that “there is no certainty whatsoever about the results.”

A winner in the 2025 contest has yet to be determined, with the vote count marred by interruptions and inconsistencies in the tabulation of votes from voting centers. Honduran electoral law grants the election authority 30 days to determine a winner.

Sunday’s vote resulted in what is described as a technical tie, with only a handful of votes separating first and second place. The latest figures put the National Party candidate Nasry Asfura, the conservative candidate openly backed by U.S. President Donald Trump, with a slim lead over Nasralla.

While Asfura had the lead after Sunday’s early results, the lead eventually went to Nasralla as more voting locations submitted their tallies. Then, after the TREP system paused reporting on Tuesday, the tally again favored Asfura.

U.S. pressure and past fraud shadow unresolved vote

This sequence of events is reminiscent of the 2017 Honduran vote that saw the National Party candidate, Juan Orlando Hernández, re-elected. Hernández overtook his rival only after a days-long results blackout and power outage that sparked deadly unrest over alleged fraud.

Hernández’s rule was a late feature in this year’s contest after Trump vowed to pardon the former president who was serving a 45-year sentence on a drug trafficking conviction by a U.S. court. Trump followed through on his promise the day after the election, freeing Hernández with a pardon, while alleging he had been mistreated by the justice system.

CNE member Ochoa criticized the lack of attention given by some international observers to Trump’s flagrant interference in the Honduran election. “Added to this extremely serious situation in the electoral process is the silence of international and national observers, who avoid speaking out about the public and dangerous interference of the United States—the most powerful military and economic nation in the world—through Mr. Donald Trump,” Ochoa said in a social media post.

Trump’s call for Honduras to vote for Asfura boosted Asfura’s candidacy when the conservative candidate had been polling in third place ahead of election day. Trump centered his criticisms on Libre Party presidential candidate Rixi Moncada, but did not spare Nasralla.

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an influential grassroots social organization that advocates for human and Indigenous rights, said that, no matter who ultimately triumphs, entrenched political and criminal elites now find themselves in a position to retake power. The group published a statement that said, “The electoral trend published by the National Electoral Council reveals a political power dispute between the National Party and the Liberal Party, historically responsible for the poverty and injustice suffered by Honduras.”

COPINH also fiercely denounced Washington’s actions and urged a united front to defend the country’s sovereignty and its popular movements. “The electoral process in our country demonstrates the real ability of the United States to influence our fragile democracy,” said COPINH. “We reject U.S. interference and its hypocritical ‘international fight against drug trafficking,’ made evident by the release of narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández.”

The overt U.S. interference comes as Washington, under Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, brings a renewed focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. The Trump administration released its National Security Strategy on Thursday, a document that explicitly spells out the government’s attention on the Western Hemisphere, framing a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that pledges to reassert U.S. dominance in the region. Trump’s intervention in favor of Asfura aligns with this new vision, seeking to put an unconditional ally into power in Tegucigalpa that will allow the U.S. to extend its economic and military influence in Central America.

Regardless who ultimately is declared the victor in Honduras, the incoming government is expected to face a credibility crisis along with instability and social unrest.

Annie Bird, the director of advocacy group Rights & Ecology, was in Honduras to accompany the vote alongside a team from the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a Washington-based think tank. Bird told Drop Site News that Hondurans were “outraged” by President Trump’s call to vote for the National Party candidate. Bird added that some voters she talked to felt compelled to vote for Trump’s candidate as they felt that the crucial remittances they depend on from their families in the U.S. were at stake.

“The U.S. government has a coercive power that Hondurans have seen undermine their democracy consistently for decades,” she said, “but under Trump, [they] have now also seen it brutalize their families with his violent immigration policies.”