The razor-thin outcome of Honduras’s presidential election reveals less about partisan strength than about the vulnerability of democratic legitimacy under stress. When victory margins fall below a percentage point, elections cease to be simple contests of numbers and instead become tests of institutional credibility. In this case, delays, technical failures, and competing claims of interference have transformed a procedural exercise into a national reckoning over trust.

The declared winner, Nasry Asfura, enters office with a formal mandate but a contested moral one. While the vote count eventually produced a result, the process by which it arrived there ~ system crashes, manual recounts of a significant share of ballots, and weeks of uncertainty ~ has left space for doubt. For the runner-up, Salvador Nasralla, rejection of the outcome reflects not just personal grievance but a broader anxiety shared by supporters who view procedural........

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