Elections in Venezuela and Honduras: Two Sides of the Same Coin — Minted in Washington

Unsurprisingly, the electoral commission in Honduras has declared the Trump-backed candidate, “Tito” Nasry Asfura, as the winner of the presidential elections by a margin of less than one percent, over Salvador Nasralla.

The election of Asfura represents a continuation of a U.S.-backed coup in 2009, which installed a “narco regime” in power, as described by the U.S. Department of Justice. Asfura belongs to the same party as the former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been re-elected unconstitutionally for a second mandate in 2017, during Trump’s first term, and who was later convicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking and recently pardoned by Trump.

The electoral process has been plagued by irregularities and inconsistencies since it began. Nick Corbishley explained how the outcome of the elections was already decided before a vote was cast:

Honduran politicians, including the presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla, converged on Washington last week to attend a Western Hemisphere Subcommittee hearing in the US Congress. The subcommittee is chaired by Representative María Elvira Salazar, another Floridian lawmaker who is desperate to see the back of left-wing governments in Latin America (more on her later).

As the Observatory of the Progressive International reports, the hearing was titled “Democracy in Danger: The Fight for Free Elections in Honduras”:

The hearing was framed in Washington as an “urgent” assessment of the situation in Honduras. In reality, the hearing sought to preemptively question the legitimacy of Honduras’s electoral institutions, to cast doubt on the democratic process, and to prepare the ground for claims of fraud before a single vote has been cast. This represents a dangerous escalation of foreign interference — one that threatens the integrity of the upcoming elections and echoes a long history of external interference in the country’s political life.

The playbook bears clear echoes of what happened last year with the presidential elections in Venezuela. Then, as now, senior local opposition figures, including, ahem, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado, and US lawmakers began sowing doubts about the election process before a single vote had been cast. If the opposition parties ended up losing, they said, it would all be down to fraud. As such, there was no intention of ever accepting the results.

Following that meeting, Trump published an extensive post on Truth Social endorsing Asfura: “I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists, and Nasralla is not a reliable partner for Freedom, and cannot be trusted. I hope the people of Honduras vote for Freedom and Democracy, and elect Tito Asfura, President!”

The electoral process was then heavily manipulated. The electoral authority acknowledged thousands of polling station records with inconsistencies: mathematical errors, missing signatures, and mismatches between physical records and digital results. This led to a special count, meant to review problematic actas.

The counting of the actas lacked transparency. The electoral body reduced the number of actas reviewed, leaving thousands of disputed votes outside the recount. The special count was delayed for weeks, interrupted by protests and political disputes. Another key issue was the electronic transmission of results. Reporting pauses, sudden changes in vote trends, and limited access for observers fuelled accusations of manipulation.

In an ironic contortion, The Intercept reported that MS-13, a Trump-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, intimidated Hondurans into not voting for the left-leaning presidential candidate, urging them instead to cast their ballots for the right-wing National Party candidate — the same candidate endorsed by the U.S. president.

The final decision of the electoral body to declare Nasry Asfura as president was therefore expected, as were Nasralla’s fraud accusations, supported by the current president, Xiomara Castro, who denounced an electoral coup. Nasralla demands that votes be counted one by one and that the process not rely on the electoral sheets which, he says, have been manipulated and are not legitimate. However, Nasralla was Washington’s second-best option, as he was also present at the Washington meeting should election manipulation prove insufficient. This is further evidenced by Nasralla’s naive attempt to seek Trump’s help to review the electoral process.

Minutes after the election result was announced, Marco Rubio published a press release: “The United States congratulates President-Elect Nasry Asfura of Honduras on his clear electoral victory, confirmed by Honduras’ National Electoral Council.” Hours later, Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and the Dominican Republic followed suit and published statements recognising Asfura as the winner. However, this election was anything but a “clear electoral victory.”

The inconsistencies and irregularities in the electoral process in Honduras are similar, as noted by Nick above, to what happened in Venezuela about a year ago.

Before official results were announced, María Corina Machado declared Edmundo González president-elect, claiming a landslide victory based on quick counts from only about 30 percent of polling stations. The Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE) took longer than usual to release results and failed to publish vote breakdowns by polling station, prompting calls for transparency from the Carter Center and Brazil’s government.

The narrative was further shaped by exit polls from Edison Research, a U.S.-based pollster with a history of providing politically convenient exit-poll numbers, circulated by U.S. media and opposition figures before official results were known. The government of Nicolás Maduro reported a cyberattack on the electronic transmission system, while social media disinformation — including a fake ballot-theft video amplified by Elon Musk — intensified public confusion.

The diffrence is that, in this case, the U.S. had much less manouvering room to achieve it’s desired results. So, of course, did not congratulate the winner after the results were announced, and Latin American countries aligned with Washington were quick to question the outcome. Immediately afterward, a widespread campaign against Maduro’s government was set in motion.

Maduro was asked to provide the tally sheets from voting stations to “publicly” verify the results. He could have done so, but nothing in Venezuelan law requires him to do it and, taking into account the allegations of a cyberattack on the electronic transmission system that could have altered those sheets, if true, it is understandable that his government might have chosen not to do so.

The tally sheets have been the central pillar of the widespread accusation of electoral fraud and what critics — even left-leaning ones, like Petro — have used to denounce him. Are we going to see the same campaign demanding a vote-by-vote count to “publicly” certify the electoral result in Honduras, as Nasralla demands?

Definitely not. As it stands right now, Asfura is already the president-elect of Honduras, certified by the U.S. and recognised by at least ten other US aligned countries in the region. Those who might have doubts regarding the results are not going to risk opposing Washington to support a relatively small electoral process, especially when there is plausible political cover for not doing so.

Ultimately, we will never know for sure whether Maduro was elected fairly, whether he tampered with the count — certainly, he would have had reasons to do so — or whether Nasralla received more votes than Asfura. But it does not really matter. What matters is which candidate the U.S. decides has to win. This is the real-time meaning of the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

But there is more at stake here than U.S. hemispheric ambitions. The U.S. and the Western world uphold the democratic process as the only valid source of political authority. By using that same process to legitimise governments that are not necessarily the result of it but are vested with its legitimacy — as is arguably the case in Honduras, but also in Romania and the attempt in Venezuela — the entire rationale of democratic legitimacy collapses.