El Ciudadano
Original article: Golpe Electoral en Honduras: Consejero del CNE confirma irregularidades electorales masivas
The counselor of the National Electoral Council, Marlon Ochoa, stated that the general elections in Honduras are characterized by significant irregularities, corroborating previously made claims by candidate Rixi Moncada and recently by Salvador Nasralla.
Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In a press conference on Thursday night, December 4, National Electoral Council counselor Marlon Ochoa reported that the general elections in Honduras have been marred by widespread irregularities and a potential electoral coup, revealing that 16,615 ballots—equivalent to approximately two million votes—were deliberately withheld in the Preliminary Electoral Results Transmission System (TREP).
Ochoa highlighted that on the night before the election, Saturday, November 29, the Council approved the removal of mandatory cross-checking between the biometric voter registry and the closing reports, which he deemed illegal and a means to inflate results. He pointed out that by the morning of Wednesday, December 3, 15,297 presidential level ballots had been transmitted, representing 79.8 percent of the national total of 19,167, and that 13,246 ballots, or 86.6 percent, exhibited errors and inconsistencies between the biometric data and the records in the TREP, generating a discrepancy of 982,412 votes.
The counselor recalled that serious structural flaws were identified during a mock election conducted on November 9, which included low capacity in report transmission, absence of a scrutiny module, lack of dissemination facilities, and extraordinary automatic assignment of votes. He asserted that, although some deficiencies were corrected, there were insufficient guarantees to verify the integrity of the system, raising alarms among technicians and external audit team CGTS.
Ochoa disclosed that on November 29, he received an external audit report warning about critical inconsistencies, which he could not present to the Council due to a session being interrupted while one counselor left the room and another suspended the meeting, preventing urgent decisions from being made. According to Ochoa, this internal sabotage was part of an operation to disregard warnings prior to the election.
On election night, thousands of members of the Vote Receiving Boards and custodians observed that the TREP misinterpreted handwritten numbers on ballots, assigning figures of 600 or 700 votes that did not match reality. Furthermore, he reported that the system transferred votes between candidates and parties, confirming allegations documented in 26 audio recordings presented to the Public Ministry.
The withholding of 16,615 ballots for forty hours—equivalent to two million votes—was another critical point. Ochoa explained that these ballots were sent from transmission centers and received in the central CNE system on election night but were not processed or disclosed for two days, a period he asserted was used to alter them and align them with a manipulation plan.
The counselor also noted that the official results dissemination page experienced prolonged outages on November 30 and December 1 and has had continuous interruptions since then. He pointed out inconsistencies in published data, errors in summations, and simultaneous failures in more than 700 satellite antennas, as well as on the Tigo and Claro channels. He indicated that he proposed manually removing SIM cards from biometric devices, a measure he rejected to maintain vote traceability. He confirmed that Smartmatic validated some of these issues and the presented audios contain evidence of the operation.
Ochoa declared this election as “the least transparent in our democratic history,” surpassing the elections of 2013 and 2017. He denounced unprecedented foreign intervention, indicating that reports from international observation missions ignore this interference, and by not mentioning it, they become complicit in the usurpation of popular will.
The counselor criticized that the bipartisanship within the CNE makes decisions outside of the Council’s plenary and that his office is not part of these agreements. He reiterated that ASD, the company responsible for the transmission and scrutiny systems, did not complete the contingency process in time. This system, which was supposed to process physical ballots in Tegucigalpa, was still in testing as of December 5, five days after the elections. Ochoa asserted that without this process, the speed and reliability of the definitive scrutiny are compromised.
Ultimately, Ochoa maintained that the irregularities are not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated operation between internal actors and external support to manipulate the popular will. He warned that the TREP not only determines preliminary results but also processes ballots from all levels of elections, consolidating a threat to the integrity of the elections and leaving the Honduran people with an unprecedented situation in the country’s democratic history.
La entrada Honduras Election Crisis: National Electoral Council Counselor Confirms Massive Irregularities se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.
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