Honduran Civic Group Returns Quick Election Day Data

Hagamos Democracia, an NDI-partner organization based in Honduras, released a series of reports during the presidential, congressional and municipal elections on Nov. 29 in Honduras. The nonpartisan organization dispatched more than 1,000 election observers to all 18 departments and 283 of the 298 municipal districts.

Hagamos Democracia (HD) monitored the quality of the general election process and also conducted a parallel vote tabulation (PVT or "quick count") using a statistically random sample of polling station results with technical support from NDI.

See a slideshow below with photos taken at the Hagamos Democracia headquarters in Tegucigalpa on election day. Click on each photo to read more.

By 8:30 p.m. HD was able to project a 17 percentage-point victory for National Party (Partido Nacional) candidate Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo over his chief rival Elvin Santos of the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal) with a little more than 1 percent margin of error. Based on the information available from the sample at that time, HD projected a 47.6 percent turnout among all eligible voters listed in the Honduran voter registry. This figure tracks with the steady downward trend in voter participation rates in Honduras over several elections due to a number of factors, including an inflated voter registry that many analysts believe contains approximately a million people who have either emigrated or died.

Among its earlier findings, HD reported that about 95 percent of voting centers opened within an hour of the scheduled opening time and its observers were permitted in 95 percent of the polling stations they went to observe.

Qualitatively, HD observers reported at least two party representatives were present for the counting of votes in about 97 percent of the cases. There were few reports of violence, which did not seem to have a large impact on the voting process, according to HD. In fact, its observers found that 99 percent of Hondurans seeking to vote were able to do so. A few were disenfranchised for a number of reasons: not appearing in the electoral registry, holding invalid documents, others had voted in their place or because the polling stations closed, leaving voters in line.

Hagamos Democracia is a consortium of Honduran civic groups that recruited and trained a national network of nonpartisan, domestic observer volunteers, with support from NDI over the last year.