Final Voter Participation: 52.74%
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The Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal finally published their results today, after over 30 urns were subjected to a recount. The final number of votes: 2,300,056 out of 4,361,382 registered voters.
This gives an abstention rate of 47% and a participation rate of 53%. Not terribly good, but over half the electorate, and if we take into consideration Hondurans overseas who could not vote because Zelaya shut down the consulates, the balance could be even more in favor of participation.
The hard data:
PN: Porfirio Lobo, 1,213,695 votes, 52.77%
PL: Elvin Santos, 817,524 votes, 35.54%
PINU: Bernard Martinez, 39,960 votes, 1.74%
PDC: Felícito Ávila, 38,413 votes, 1.67%
UD: Cesar Ham, 36,420 votes, 1.58%
Total Valid Votes: 2,146,012, 93.3%
Blank votes: 61,440, 2.67%
Null votes: 92,604, 4.03%
Voted: 2,300,056 people, 52.74%
Abstained: 2,061,326 people, 47.26%
TOTAL: 4,361,382 registered voters, 100%
As far as I know, all of the media who published the 61% participation are silent about it, sadly. I would expect them to issue some sort of explanation. In fact, the participation numbers were not even mentioned, or even the number of registered voters, which I had to dig out of an article that is over a year old.
But still, 53% participation is very good and something to be proud of considering the number of people who were expected to boycott the election entirely.
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Pretty sure the reason of the 61% came from TSE itself and it was a preliminary number, it also relied on the 1M+ people living abroad who could not vote, i. e. those people were deducted from the estimated count so it could get that number (Mel didn’t subtract them hence reaching his claimed 40%). It is not entirely the media’s fault since those were preliminary numbers and they did reported it as such, but internationally it was taken as final results.
On election night it was interesting that the first results announced were an even lower 47% participation (53 abstention) exactly the opposite of what the final numbers are saying (53% participation, 47% abstention). But a 6 percent margin of error is not too bad.
The day after the election, the 61% number was announced. It was the 14 percentage point discrepancy between the two numbers that made me uneasy, and gave the left a reason to increase their strident complaints of fraud.