TEGUCIGALPA (AP) — The conservative candidate Salvador Nasralla continued on Wednesday night leading the Honduran presidential election on Sunday with a slight advantage of about 13,927 votes over the also conservative Nasry Asfura, while the Central American country was still waiting for the outcome.

Both presidential candidates surpassed one million votes early Wednesday morning, according to preliminary results, which give Nasralla, of the Party Liberal, 40.23% of the votes and Asfura, from the National Party - also conservative -, 39.69% after 80.29% of the minutes were scrutinized. The official candidate Rixi Moncada continued to lag behind with 19.01 of the endorsements.

According to the dissemination system of the National Electoral Council, these preliminary results correspond to 15,378 minutes transmitted and processed out of a total of 19,152. To date, of those 15,245 minutes, there are 2,204 that present inconsistencies and must be compared vote by vote to correct them, according to the electoral body.

The CNE has a maximum of 30 days to issue a final declaration on the winner of the elections, during which time it must carry out the entire counting, processing and correction process.

The two contending candidates have respected the call of the electoral body not to declare themselves winners, although both claim to have all the minutes and consider themselves winners.

The general elections in Honduras were held on Sunday to elect the new president and three presidential appointees or vice presidents, 128 full deputies and the same number of substitutes and the 298 mayors and vice mayors.

A group of liberals took to the streets on Monday night with torches, near where the Liberal Party's campaign command is located, as a show of support for Nasralla.

The website that the Honduran electoral authorities set up to share voting results experienced “technical problems” that caused it to crash, leaving the public without information about the results of the presidential race and other extremely close votes, the CNE reported Tuesday morning.

At the time of the site's fall, only 515 votes separated the then leader Asfura from Nasralla. Neither man belongs to President Xiomara Castro's LIBRE party, although Nasralla has been both a rival and an ally, serving for a couple of years as her vice president.

U.S. President Donald Trump had thrown his support behind Asfura, saying he was the only candidate he could work with.

Hours earlier on Tuesday, U.S. officials confirmed that former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence for drug trafficking, drugs, had been released after receiving a pardon from Trump.