Hondurans were heading to bed on Monday, with two candidates in a virtual tie for the presidency and election officials urging calm and patience as they finished counting tallies by hand.
Then President Trump intervened once more in the small Central American nation’s election.
“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,” he wrote online on Monday night. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”
His evidence? He said Honduran election officials had “abruptly stopped counting” at midnight the night before.
In reality, Honduras’s election agency had updated the results at about noon local time on Monday, roughly nine hours before Mr. Trump’s post. And the delay since then was expected.
That is because Honduras employs an electoral system that reports a first tranche of votes — transmitted from polling stations digitally — as preliminary results. Workers then verify all vote tallies by hand, and there is often a delay in between. It is difficult to send all tallies digitally because internet connections can be sparse and unstable in some parts of the country.
The preliminary results on Monday showed a virtual tie in the race. With 57 percent of ballots reported, two right-wing candidates, Nasry Asfura and Salvador Nasralla, each had 40 percent of the vote. Just 515 ballots separated them.
Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Asfura in the days ahead of the vote, warning Hondurans that the United States would “not be throwing good money after bad” at the country if his preferred candidate did not win. He called Mr. Nasralla a “borderline Communist.” And he also said he would pardon a former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of helping smuggle cocaine into the United States.
Mr. Trump’s post on Monday was another extraordinary intervention in the Honduran election, as he stoked controversy, without evidence, just as election officials were calling on citizens to remain patient and peaceful.
Analysts and officials in Honduras and abroad had expressed concerns ahead of the vote that the election could be contested, because the candidates had repeatedly accused one another of plans to rig the results. Many of those accusations had targeted the left-wing governing party, whose candidate trailed by a wide margin in the preliminary results on Monday.
That fueled worries that Honduras could see a repeat of the unrest that followed the 2017 election, when a similar delay in the vote count sparked disputed results and destructive protests.
Yet on Monday, international election observers said that the election had few issues and that they would continue to monitor the count. Even with the razor-thin margin in the race, the nation was calm, and some businesses began to remove the plywood they had installed in windows in case of protests.
Ana Paola Hall, a top Honduran election official, said Monday afternoon that the National Electoral Council, or CNE, had finished reporting the digitally transmitted first tranche of votes from around the country.
She explained that officials were turning their attention to hand-counting remaining tallies, and then going back to verify all the results.
“In the face of this technical tie, we must remain calm, have patience, and wait for the CNE to finish counting,” Ms. Hall wrote online. She lauded the nation for its peaceful response.
On Monday night at a CNE office in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, election workers and military personnel unloaded sealed boxes from trucks as a man with a megaphone called out their respective numbers. The boxes were taped shut and labeled with the slogan “building democracy.”
A man who showed identification as an election official said that the vote count was on schedule and that workers had started counting the physical tallies at 10 p.m. local time, about an hour after Mr. Trump’s post.
“It is imperative that the Commission finish counting the Votes,” Mr. Trump said in his post. “Democracy must prevail!”
Jack Nicas is The Times’s Mexico City bureau chief, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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