Incriminating audio. A military demanding oversight. And a powerful leader from abroad, trying to sway voters to the right.

Those are just three of the scandals that have made Sunday’s presidential election in Honduras one of the most closely watched votes in the country’s history.

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Already, even before the polls have opened, some high-level politicians are alleging that a stolen vote is under way.

Outgoing President Xiomara Castro, for instance, has compared the situation to a “criminal conspiracy aimed at staging an electoral coup”.

But experts who spoke to Al Jazeera said that the public has grown accustomed to the uncertainty and upheaval.

After all, Honduras’s democracy is only about four decades old, and during that time, the country has struggled with government corruption and even a coup d’etat.

“Obviously, there’s a fear of violence or a coup,” said Daniel Valladares, an activist and history professor at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. “But it’s a fear we’ve always had.”

In the final days before the election, Valladares has observed a tense calm grip the Central American country.

“The environment is normal,” he said. “It’s the same thing people always say: ‘I hope there isn’t a sh** show.’”

Unclear poll results

Part of the uncertainty ahead of this year’s election stems from the poll numbers. None of the five presidential candidates on the ballot holds a definitive lead.

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There are, however, three frontrunners, considered to be neck and neck in the race.

Voters on Sunday are most likely to choose between Rixi Moncada, the candidate for Castro’s left-leaning LIBRE Party; Salvador Nasralla of the centre-right Liberal Party; and Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the conservative National Party.

None of the three has definitively pulled ahead, and voter surveys have fluctuated wildly.

For instance, one poll conducted by the Instituto de la Justicia found Moncada trailing. She had 25 percent support, compared with Asfura’s 31 percent and Nasralla’s 40.

Another poll, meanwhile, showed Moncada in the lead. More than 44 percent of those surveyed by the Mexican firm TResearch backed the left-wing candidate, compared with 19.6 percent for Nasralla and 14.8 percent for Asfura.

Other surveys have shown the three candidates in a virtual tie.

That ambiguity has led to recriminations from the major parties in the election, with each side accusing the other of manipulating the vote.

Asfura, for instance, has accused the governing LIBRE party of wielding “pressure” and “abuse” against election officials. He threatened to mobilise his supporters in protest.

“Yes, we are going to take to the streets so that there are elections and so that there is democracy and freedom,” he told the television network HCH.

Moncada, meanwhile, alleged at one of her rallies that there was an “illicit” partnership between rival parties to “steal the elections”.

“We will take the necessary measures to defend the vote of every Honduran man and woman,” she told the crowd.

Infighting at the election council

The heated rhetoric stems from several scandals. But one of the most prominent erupted in late October.

A government body known as the National Electoral Council (CNE) organises the country’s elections. It is composed of three officials, selected to represent the country’s three main political parties.

But on October 29, Marlon Ochoa, the LIBRE representative, delivered audio to prosecutors that purported to capture a conversation between his CNE colleague Cossette Lopez and an unnamed military official.

In the recording, Lopez, who represents the right-leaning National Party, allegedly discusses plans to sabotage the electoral process by “altering the popular vote” and staging a possible boycott.

“What I am sure of is that the military is on our side,” Lopez allegedly said.

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Attorney General Johel Zelaya has asserted that the recording is real, and he has opened an investigation into the incident.

But Congressional Deputy Tomas Zambrano, who is also featured on the recording, maintained the audio is “totally false, fabricated and manipulated with artificial intelligence”.

He and Asfura have defended Lopez, framing the investigation as a campaign to undermine her authority.

But the audio scandal was not the only conflict to shake the CNE.

Also in October, the head of Honduras’s armed forces, Roosevelt Hernandez, demanded that the military be allowed to conduct its own count of the upcoming election results.

Hernandez is perceived to be allied with LIBRE. Ana Paola Hall, the president of the CNE and a member of the Liberal Party, denounced his demand as “interference” in the election process.

Watchdog groups have echoed those concerns. Human Rights Watch, for instance, issued a statement saying the military “does not have any authority to access, count, transmit or review the results”.

Trump weighs in

Adding to the election turmoil is pressure from abroad.

Honduras’s largest trading partner is the United States, and the two countries have closely collaborated on issues like combating drug trafficking.

But right-wing leaders in the US have spread false information before Sunday’s election, stirring further fears about the integrity of the election.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump weighed in personally on his Truth Social platform.

He endorsed Asfuro while falsely describing the conservative candidate’s two closest rivals as puppets of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

A Moncada victory, Trump wrote, would hand the country over to “Maduro and his narco-terrorists”. And Nasralla, the US president alleged, is a “borderline Communist” who seeks to split the right-wing vote.

“The Communists are trying to trick the people by running a third Candidate, Salvador Nasralla,” Trump wrote. “The people of Honduras must not be tricked again. The only real friend of Freedom in Honduras is Tito Asfura.”

Trump is not alone in turning up the heat from the US.

Florida Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, a Republican, has likewise accused Moncada of being in Maduro’s pocket, saying the LIBRE candidate would drag Honduras into a “socialist hell”.

Valladares believes the US pressure campaign is the result of coordination with Honduras’s right wing.

“The fact that they’ve gone so far as to request that a congresswoman write a note [about the election] is frightening,” said Valladares.

Ghosts of the past

On Honduras’s left, the pressure has reawakened memories of the military coup that toppled President Castro’s husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya.

The ghost of the 2009 coup still looms large in the country. Three years into his term, Zelaya had proposed holding a referendum to rewrite Honduras’s constitution.

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But the pushback was swift. The Supreme Court issued a secret warrant for his arrest, and soldiers forced Zelaya into exile, placing him on an aeroplane to Costa Rica against his will.

Political violence spiked after the coup, and a series of contested elections followed, with right-wing governments elected each time.

In an October 29 post, President Castro compared that turmoil to the present-day election proceedings.

“The same groups that violated the Constitution in the 2009 coup and perpetrated the electoral frauds of 2013 and 2017 are now attempting once again to supplant the will of the people, sow chaos, and hijack popular sovereignty,” she wrote.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Illiam Rivera, a biology professor and LIBRE activist, accused business interests in the country of attempting to torpedo the left’s chances of re-election.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Rivera. “The Honduran right, financed by the country’s economic power groups, has triggered an insane media campaign against the candidate of the LIBRE party, Rixi Moncada.”

Another activist, Guido Eguguire, told Al Jazeera that he feared a repeat of the 2017 election cycle.

“In 2017, there was a ‘blackout’ in the voting system that hid the results in real-time,” he said. “We’re worried that there will be dynamics like what will happen in 2017.”

Still, Eguguire said, what Honduras is experiencing now is nothing new. He described the corruption allegations as an endemic problem that Sunday’s vote alone would not solve.

“Fraud has been a common practice in the country,” he said. “Frauds and coups. It’s been part of our story.”

The Organization of American States, comprised of 33 member countries, has already announced it plans to send 100 election monitors to Honduras for Sunday’s vote.

It called for election officials to carry out their work “in accordance with the law, free from interference and undue pressure of any political actor”.