The sitting president, Juan Orlando Hernández had been the favorite going into the elections, but early results showed a significant advantage for his major challenger, Salvador Nasralla.

[6] Hernández was seeking re-election, having won the 2013 contest against Xiomara Castro and Salvador Nasralla in a controversial election marred by accusations of vote buying, fraud, intimidation, and other irregularities.

[10] The 128 members of the National Congress are elected by open list proportional representation from 18 multi-member constituencies based on the departments ranging in size from one to 23 seats.

[13] Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a coup in 2009 for holding the Honduran fourth ballot box referendum, which some have claimed he was using to alter this article of the constitution.

[18] Former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, who was forced out of office in the coup in 2009, supported Nasralla and acted as a political strategist for the Opposition Alliance's campaign.

[19] The centrist Liberal Party nominated former president of the Central American Technological University Luis Zelaya [es] as its candidate.

[20] The President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, David Matamoros Batson, stated that the election budget is 1.098 million Honduran lempiras.

[6] Nooruddin concluded that the "differences are too large to be generated by chance and are not easily explicable, raising doubts as to the veracity of the overall result.

[3] On 2 December, the Honduran National Roundtable for Human Rights issued a press release, in which it declared that the government actions were state terrorism against civilians, it warned that the declaration of a state of exception was in order to create repression to ensure electoral fraud labeling it as illegal after reading several articles of the Honduran constitution.

[32] As of 15 December 2017, the court had finished a recount of ballot boxes that presented irregularities but had still not declared a winner, and protests continued throughout the country, with 16 deaths and 1,675 arrests, according to Honduras' National Human Rights' Commission.

[34] The country's two major cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, saw streets blockaded, their main exits blocked, and traffic between them severely reduced.

[34][35] Organization of American States (OAS) election monitors, in their final report, documented widespread and numerous irregularities in the conduct of the voting and ballot tabulation, and doubted the validity of the official results.