TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Honduran electoral workers have begun counting vote tallies by hand with the two presidential front runners, Nasry Asfura and Salvador Nasralla, still locked in a virtual tie, two days after an election marked by extraordinary U.S. interference.
On Monday, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez of the National Party was released from a U.S. prison, where he was serving a 45-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and firearms charges, a Federal Bureau of Prisons registry showed.
His release came after U.S. President Donald Trump urged Honduran voters to cast their ballots for the National Party candidate, Nasry Asfura, and said he would pardon Hernandez.
The preliminary results released on Monday show Asfura and Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party each holding just under 40% of the vote, with Asfura only 515 votes ahead. Rixi Moncada, of the ruling LIBRE Party, was well behind in third with 19% of the vote.
With the razor thin margin, the electoral body declared the race a "technical tie." Ana Paola Hall, the body's president, called for calm and patience as electoral workers moved into the slower stage of verifying the vote tallies by hand. The preliminary results are based on tallies digitally transmitted by polling stations across the country.
Trump weighed in on Monday in a social media post in which he alleged, without evidence, that Honduras was "trying to change the results of their Presidential Election."
"If they do there will be hell to pay! The people of Honduras voted in overwhelming numbers on November 30th," Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
There was high voter turnout in Sunday's election, which was peaceful across the country, according to the Organization of American States, which observed the vote. It said in a statement on Monday that it "was able to verify that the voting proceeded normally, except for isolated incidents in some municipalities of the country."
But there are concerns that if the vote count drags on, the highly charged election environment could lead to protests and possible violence. On Monday, problems with the online portal where results were meant to be updated added to frustration around the vote. The website appeared to be down for long stretches, with local media criticizing the outage.
On Monday evening, Moncada of the LIBRE Party said that the elections were "still not lost" and alleged that the other parties had manipulated the process. She also denounced U.S. interference in the election.
In the runup, Trump weighed in on the tightly contested race to throw his support behind Asfura, 67-year-old former mayor of Tegucigalpa, in a series of social media posts, saying he could work with him to counter drug trafficking. He accused Moncada of being a "communist."
(Reporting by Laura Garcia in Tegucigalpa, Laura Gottesdiener and Diego Ore in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Aida Pelaez-Fernandez;)
