Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

They confirmed his quick count. With 57 percent of the vote in, Nasralla was leading by five points. Sometime the next morning, one of the tribunal’s magistrates let slip to a local reporter that the outcome appeared to be “irreversible.” Soon afterward, everything went dark. The electoral tribunal halted the count and claimed the army had to bring, by truck, tens of thousands of outstanding ballots from the countryside. Contreras and Dale oversaw the software used to process the ballots once they were electronically scanned into the system, but they couldn’t control the rest of the process. On Monday, the day after the election, the incoming electronic scans had slowed to a trickle. The data was not getting entered into the system. On Tuesday evening, the computers crashed; no one could say why. When they came back online a few hours later, the electoral tribunal announced that the five-point Nasralla lead had turned into a 1.2 percent advantage for Hernández.