The presidential candidate for Honduras' conservative Liberal Party, Salvador Nasralla, said on Wednesday that his party 'won by a wide margin' in the November 30 elections and reiterated his demand for a 'vote-by-vote recount.' 'That is why everyone is asking for a vote-by-vote recount, because the Liberal Party of Honduras won by a wide margin,' Nasralla emphasized, who is in second place in the preliminary count by the National Electoral Council (CNE), as 99.40% of the ballot sheets have been tallied and at least 2,773 with inconsistencies remain to be counted. The Liberal Party leader also denounced what he calls 'three failures' in the Preliminary Electoral Results Transmission System (TREP). The failures were detected in the system implemented by the Colombian company ASD, which, according to Nasralla, would have altered the tally results, for which he insisted on the need for a recount of paper ballots. The first failure pointed out by Nasralla is the existence of 119,000 null votes, a figure that, he says, exceeds the difference of about 40,000 votes with which he is surpassed by the candidate for the conservative National Party, Nasry 'Tito' Asfura, who has the backing of U.S. President Donald Trump. The second irregularity is related to the operation of the biometric system: out of the 19,167 ballots in the process, more than 17,000 present discrepancies between the fingerprint and the information recorded on the ballot, he assured. The third failure is that, through 'misconfigured JSON' (a format used to convert ballots into digital data), the Liberal Party would have been 'stripped of 300,000 votes.' The latest CNE report keeps Asfura in the lead with 1,298,835 votes (40.52%), followed by Nasralla with 1,256,428 votes (39.48%), while the candidate for the ruling Liberty and Refoundation Party (Libre), Rixi Moncada, is third with 618,448 votes (19.29%). Nasralla proposed returning to the transmission system used until 2017 or hiring another company to process the digital files, arguing that 'ASD should not do it because it made a mistake on all the ballots,' and asked his followers to have 'absolute tranquility' and wait for the popular will to be respected. The candidate thanked the presidential designee (vice president) candidate for the National Party, María Antonieta Mejía, for expressing her willingness to a vote-by-vote recount, and the Libre Party, whose general coordinator is former President Manuel Zelaya, for 'recognizing' that the Liberal Party won the elections. Zelaya, who is also the husband and chief advisor to President Xiomara Castro, said on Tuesday that, according to Libre's national count of presidential ballots, Nasralla won the election.
