Polls showed a tight race between Porfirio Lobo Sosa of the governing National Party and the Liberal Party candidate Manuel Zelaya.
Aristides Mejia, president of Honduras' national election institute, said Sunday night that more votes needed to be counted before results would be released but that ''the clear tendency is in favor of Zelaya.''
Zelaya declared himself the winner a little more than an hour after polls closed. His supporters flooded into the streets of the capital waving the Liberal Party's flag and blowing their car horns.
A national exit poll released by Honduran television stations HRN and Channel 5 showed candidate Zelaya ahead by about 6 percentage points.
In an interview with local media, Lobo Sosa said, ''We have results that don't coincide with those of the Liberal Party. . . . It is a close race and it will be a long night of counting votes.''
The country's nearly 4 million voters also were electing a vice president, 128 congressional representatives, 298 mayors and 2,000 city councilors. Sunday's vote is the seventh in the Central American nation of 7 million since 1981, when it abandoned more than two decades of military rule.
Despite fears that fraud or gang members could disrupt the elections, early polling took place with no apparent problems.
''We've matured as a democracy,'' said Octavio Vazquez Rodriguez, a 69-year-old physician who described voting as ''peaceful'' at polling places at the country's national university. ''Before, people used to come here and pull your hair or fight with you,'' he added.
The balloting took place under the watch of more than 16,000 soldiers and police officers, as well as 6,000 local observers and 114 election monitors from 14 countries.
Cesar Amador, 31, a National Police officer who was keeping watch at the university, said party zealots ''used to arrive to steal ballots or to beat people up.''
''Today everything is calm,'' he said.
Lobo Sosa, widely reported to have studied in a communist school in the former Soviet Union, is now a hard-line conservative. As congressional president he helped current President Ricardo Maduro push through laws to criminalize gang membership.
Lobo Sosa said that if elected, he will institute the death penalty for ''abominable crimes,'' including sexual assault, kidnapping and murder. He says many of those crimes are committed by gangs.
Honduras abolished the death penalty in 1937.
Zelaya, a former congressman and bank director, insists the shortest road to prosperity for a country with a 70 percent poverty rate is to eliminate corruption, which he claims is rife in the National Party-ruled government and the private sector.
Zelaya has proposed several measures to give citizens more power, including a transparency law and a civil assembly to monitor the government. He also promises to support life imprisonment for hard core criminals, including gang members. Honduran law does not allow life imprisonment, though judges have imposed sentences of up to 60 years for grave crimes.
