Honduras authorities to review election fraud claim

Honduras' top electoral authority on Monday agreed to review electoral rolls and results from the country's November 24 presidential vote after a leading candidate charged fraud. Leftist Xiomara Castro, wife of the ousted former president Manuel Zelaya, claims officials manipulated the outcome to hand the presidency to conservative Juan Orlando Hernandez. "Let us find the tools for it, and let's do this in the most public way possible so that absolutely no doubt remains," David Matamoros, head of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) told Castro and Zelaya, lead of her Libre party, after they headed to TSE headquarters to press for a new vote count or procedural review. The electoral roll and results documents, which include the voters' registry and the results for each party, were scanned and sent to the TSE's tallying center in the capital. Zelaya has asked for the 16,135 original polling station summary documents to be brought in for manual review at TSE headquarters. And he wants at least 200 technicians aligned with the Libre party to monitor the process. "We would like to get going on this this afternoon," Matamoros said. "We have received the request and we will be giving it our full attention .... We will have to sit down and see what the verification process includes." Matamoros asked that if the process shows Castro did not win, that she publicly accept her defeat; Zelaya shot back and demanded that "if Xiomara has won, the TSE must acknowledge it." On Saturday, the TSE said the results showed Hernandez earned 36.80 percent to Castro's 28.79. Sunday, thousands of demonstrators pressed for a recount on the streets of the Central American nation, one of the poorest in Latin America. Zelaya, then elected president, was ousted just four years ago in a military-backed coup. European Union and Organization of American States observers had called the elections transparent. So did the US-based Carter Center. But renowned Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who witnessed the voting, said there was in fact electoral fraud using various means and methods. And an Austrian official with the EU mission said that, while their preliminary report may have concluded the elections were transparent, many observers disagreed. The winner will run a country of 8.5 million people with 71 percent of the population living in poverty and a soaring homicide rate of 20 murders per day, one of the deadliest in the world.