The US Department of State demanded that Honduras’ National Electoral Council immediately begin a manual count of ballots from last month’s presidential election, which has been stalled by protests and wrangling over alleged fraud.The electoral council has blamed protests for preventing it from starting the manual count of hundreds of thousands of ballots that it said showed inconsistencies and were therefore excluded from the initial tally.For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app.Adding those ballots to the overall count could easily overturn conservative Nasry Asfura’s current razor-thin margin of 43,000 votes - out of more than 3 million cast - over center-right candidate Salvador Nasralla.“Any call to disrupt public order or the CNE’s (election council’s) work will be met with consequences,” the US State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs said in a post on X. “The voices of 3.4 million Hondurans must be respected and upheld.”A