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 Haiti's
Election Failed Rural Voters
Despite
Public Praise, Haiti’s Election Failed Rural Voters by J.P.
Shuster, March 25, 2006
The two observers from the European Union planned to check in
on the voting office in Sainton, a crumbling, one-room courthouse, just after 6
a.m. to confirm that the polls had opened on time and without
irregularity. They would then continue on to the rest of the voting
offices in the South-Aquin
electoral district, including
the three other offices in the
commune
of Fond des Blancs. But at 8:30 a.m., the young, French-speaking
observers, one representing Luxemburg and the other, Belgium,
remained hovering over the lists of registered
voters posted on the courthouse doors. Joined by the voting office’s
supervisor, Mr. Onald Beauvil, the three officials scanned for
the names of registered voters, trying to deduce why the list
did not match their official voting register, freshly printed
on several sheets of loose-leaf hours before the voting office’s
tardy opening.
The new voting process by
identification card, the government’s “first attempt
at a reliable voter register,” required that election officials
permit only those whose names appeared on both the preprinted
list of registered voters and the final voter register to vote.
The three disappeared inside to check the official voter register
for the third time, and at the advice of the European Union observers,
Mr. Beauvil permitted the first trickle of voters to begin casting
ballots. And what about those whose names were not on the final
register? They were told to walk two to three hours to the next
closest voting station in Frangipane to see if perhaps their names
appeared on the neighboring locality’s final voting register
instead.
The officials’ confusion began to wear on the voters’
patience – some had stood in place for over three hours
- and a crescendo of fiery accusations soon severed the morning
air.
“Four voting stations in Fond des Blancs? Where? We have
no stations!” cried
Francois Frederick of Sainton over the swelling lines of irritated
voters as he emerged from a fruitless attempt to vote. Scores
of residents entered the small building after Mr. Frederick to
find that the faulty final voting register also could not verify
their registration.
Jean-Pierre Elias, a farmer from Sainton, emerged from the office,
shouting curses onto the swelling lines of irritated voters. Like
many voters eager to register, he had trailed the officials from
the Office of Election Registration (BIV) to the voting office
in Frangipane when the officials had not showed up in Sainton
to register voters. The officials had assured Mr. Elias that their
office would send his registration back to Sainton before the
election, but inside the aging courthouse, Sainton’s final
voting register did not have his name, and he too was denied his
right to vote.
One couple, an elderly husband and wife, had started walking from
Frangipane to Sainton at 3 a.m. after not finding their names
on the preprinted list of registered voters, only to find that
Sainton did not have their names on its final voting register
either. Election officials told the couple they should walk back
to Frangipane to check the other office’s final voting register,
but could give them no assurance that their names would be there.
Out in the street, dozens of community members crowded Mr. Beauvil,
who was frantically pleading with motorcycle drivers to help transport
voters to Fond des Blancs’ three other voting offices. Other
voters abandoned the chaos for home when the E.U. observers regretfully
admitted, “it is too late; there is no other plan.”
Without the capability of printing a revised final voting register
for Sainton’s voting office, they could not reverse the
problems already in motion.
The botched proceedings of the February 7 vote in Fond des Blancs,
more specifically, at the voting office in Sainton, did not result
only from a faulty list of registered voters. The mountainous,
rural commune, like countless others in Haiti’s southern
province, has had no substantial interaction with a national government
since members of the international community froze development
assistance to Rene Preval’s government in 2000. Its roads,
made nearly impassable by a particularly harsh rainy season, even
prevented non-governmental relief agencies from carrying vital
food and medical supplies out to the population of roughly 45,000
predominately illiterate peasants for several months.
As plans for a national election circulated through the offices
of Haiti’s interim government and the United Nations Mission
in Haiti, Fond des Blancs saw little evidence of the preparations.
Only a single presidential candidate, Guy Phillippe, the former
military officer and coup leader, bothered to come speak to the
community. It appeared that even the candidates had deemed Fond
des Blancs inconsequential to their campaign. The international
community - Canada, the European Union, and the United States
– barreled ahead with elections despite reports of grossly
ill-prepared rural communities, thus building upon the area’s
historic neglect by financing the elections without making any
effort to retrieve Fond des Blancs from the socio-political margins.
Educating the population of Fond des Blancs on the revolving status
of the election and about the details of the thirty-three candidates’
platforms progressed with similar laxity. Yves Rene Guillaume,
a volunteer for the Department Election Bureau (BED) working to
prepare the population of Sainton to vote, repeatedly found no
one present at BED’s headquarters in Aquin to update him
on the details of the election’s four postponements or to
even provide him with his education materials. He had difficulty
finding venues to speak at as uninformed community members assumed
he was campaigning for individual candidates.
While a portion of the $73 million given to Haiti’s Interim
Government (IGH) for the elections – almost $30 per vote
cast - could have been used to provide the rural citizens with
information on the election as well as rudimentary training on
how to use the election’s new ballot, paid government officials
left the work to a handful of
ill-informed volunteers. As a result, hearsay perpetuated glorified
claims about candidates raising Haiti’s minimum wage by
400 percent and voting with a new ballot system was left to the
guesswork of mostly illiterate peasants.
“Many people are going to vote for the candidate with the
best picture,” predicted Mr. Guillaume.
Long-term election observers - those who had followed the election
from within the country since before November – explained
that an extremely late registration process in Sainton upset election
preparations and poised the office for calamity on Election Day.
Over a period of two weeks in October, officials from the Office
of Voting and Inscription (BIV) came to Sainton a total of five
isolated and unannounced days to register voters. On each of the
five days, the officials only registered voters after a candidate
running for commune deputy supplied his own generator and gasoline
to print the legally-required identification cards. Many voters
did not even know the BIV officials had come.
Before that time, however, the United States’ denial of
the United Nation’s Stabilization Mission in Haiti’s
(MINUSTAH) request for ten military helicopters to distribute
election materials to Haiti’s more isolated rural localities
confirmed that Fond des Blancs would become one of the many provincial
communes to not only suffer from a lack of civic education and
registration materials, but also from the absence of necessary
election supplies.
On the day of the election, the erroneous final voting registers
became palpable testimonies to an ill-prepared election process
that at no time had the capacity to document the voices of Fond
des Blancs’ isolated masses. Despite the two years of preparation
and the seventy-three million dollars spent on Haiti’s 2005-2006
national election, less than two hundred of the four-hundred legally
registered voters trying to vote in the Sainton voting office
found their names on the preprinted list of registered voters,
entered the dilapidated courthouse, matched their identification
cards with the office’s final voter register, and successfully
cast a ballot.
Likewise, Frangipane’s voting office permitted a mere sixty-four
of the four hundred voters who had registered at the office to
elect the next president and legislative body of their country.
Still, the Interim Government of Haiti (IGH), the National Electoral
Council (CEN), MINUSTAH, and the international community cannot
cite any evidence that the pitiable minority of successful voters
received sufficient education and formal instructions how to vote
in accordance with the updated election regulations.
Some residents have speculated that political motivations of the
above-mentioned groups contributed to the repeated neglect of
Fond des Blancs’ voters. The residents charge that the groups,
sensing a large support in Haiti’s rural communes for presidential
frontrunner, Rene Preval, did not work to assure the community’s
access to the polls, in an attempt to avoid a sweeping Preval
victory.
Post-electoral events, including the highly disputed, non-transparent
vote counting process that slowly reversed Preval’s initial
leap towards a presidential victory one week after the election
and the dozens of boxes containing ballots marked by and large
for Preval found the following weekend by journalists digging
through a Port-au-Prince landfill cannot allow for a complete
denial of the residents’ grievance. Regrettably, the same
non-existing government structures that prevented the majority
of voters in Fond des Blancs from participating in the election
have also left the people without a means to voice the concern.
UN Special Envoy Juan Gabriel Valdez, seeing the long line of
voters pouring down the street past St. Pierre Church in Port-au-Prince,
proudly declared Haiti’s presidential election to be “a
victory for democracy, a victory for Haiti.” Though the
majority of Fond des Blancs’s residents would celebrate
the agreement giving Rene Preval the presidency eight days later,
in Fond des Blancs, democratic elections alone could not claim
the hard-earned victory.
The upcoming legislative runoff, now slated for April 21, will
inevitably disenfranchise the same population again, as Haitian
law does not permit residents who did not vote in the first round
on February 7 to vote in the second round. Still without adequate
information on the candidates’ platforms or any assurance
that
further organizational failure will not exclude even more residents
from voting, many in Fond des Blancs are bracing for more confusion
and disappointment at the polls on the 21. For others, there may
be another way of thinking – attempt the election offices,
stay, and watch the action of the officials – a sign that
rural Haitians have
learned to live the oft quoted admonishment, “the price
of Democracy is eternal vigilance.”
J.P. Shuster is a recent Boston College graduate
and a former volunteer at the Haitian Multi-Service Center in
Dorcester, MA. He currently lives and works in Fond des Blancs,
Haiti as a volunteer for the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation, based
in Randolph, MA.
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ANSWER
THE CALL:
Help protect the Feb. 7, 2006 Haitian
vote,
Join The FreeHaitiMovement
To
join our list of sponsors this year. Please
send an e-mail to Erzilidanto@yahoo.com
To sponsor a FreeHaitiMovement
event: The Free Haiti Movement: Dessalines Is Rising Worldwide
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/solidarityday/infoforsponsors.html
 ACTION
REQUESTED: Sponsors
are encouraged to endorse the Haiti Resolution, join HLLN's letter
writing campaigns, (such as, our Media campaigns to stop the lies
and fabrications and criminalizations of the poor majority in
Haiti, "stop UN massacres in Site Soley" and the "free
the political prisoners campaigns"). Endorsers are encouraged
to sponsor a "To-Tell the truth about Haiti Forum",
to sponsor teach-ins, rallies, vigils and lectures, throughout
the year, but especially on May
18, Haiti's flag day, on August 14 -the anniversary
of Bwa Kayiman, the ceremony that begun the great Haitian revolution,
and, on October 17th - the anniversary of Dessaline's death, and
Haiti's very first coup d'etat. Sponsors and endorsers of the
Haiti Resolutions are encouraged to learn and teach their communities
about Haiti's historical accomplishments. HLLN, shall provide,
upon request, access to suggested written materials, audio and
video streaming for internet and DVD distribution of testimony
from victims and resisters of the coup d'etat; letter campaigns,
media outreach campaigns; HLLN suggests the wearing and flying
of the blue and red colors of Haiti; and, that each year, at least
on May 18, August 14 and Oct. 17, sponsors and endorsers commit
to fax, call-in and deliver to the French, Canadian and US Embassies
and Consulates worldwide, the People of Haiti's demand that France,
Canada, the US and the international community respect Haitian
sovereignty, stop inflicting Haiti with their traditional "benevolence,"
racism, patriarchy and incessant corrupt intervention in Haiti's
affairs, through foreign "aid" and debt.Haiti.
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HLLN
call for investigation of electoral fraud to dilute the People's
Feb. 7th vote - Some of the factors to be investigated:
There were fewer than 800 polling
stations for the 2006 election, with no stations in Site Soley
and the poorest areas, where President Aristide and President
Préval's supporters live, compared with 12,000 polling
stations in 2000 when the International Community wasn't in charge
of Haiti's government and Provisional Electoral Council (CEP)
as they are with the imposed Boca Raton regime.
Even without campaigning because of the coup d'etat repression
and for fear of being thrown in jail to join the other Lavalas
political prisoners, President Preval won by a clear LANDSLIDE,
garnering four/five times more votes than the Coup D'etat candidates
supported by the International Community - the next highest per
cent reported after Préval was 12.8%. And, that’s
not taking into consideration the burnt dumpster ballots, and
blank-ballot stuffing which, if these were not a factor, could
only increase Renè Préval’s proportion and
reduce his coup d'etat opponents percentages.
HLLN insists on a full investigation into the Internationally-run
and financed 2006 Haiti election, including discovering exactly
where the ballots found in the dumpster came from? Why was the
truck carrying the ballots to the dumpster for burning HIRED by
the UN/MINUSTHA forces in charge of keeping ballots safe and secure?
If these sorts of allegations were made in any other country about
the UN representatives, if thousands of ballots found in a dumpster
while the ballot-counting process was still ongoing had happen
in the US, France or Canada, you’d expect an investigation?
Why not the double standard? Why not the same respect for an election
in Haiti, especially given the totally illegal bi-centennial Coup
d'etat that preceded the Feb. 7th elections, especially in light
of the fact the UN Security Council which refused to send help
to Haiti's elected government BEFORE to coup, sent help to uphold
the coup detat regime after President Aristide was flown out of
Haiti under military pressure from France, Canada and the US!
The world owes the innocent Haitian people more respect for their
sovereignty and the international community which trivialized
Haitian democracy and justice, at its whim, shares a grave responsibility
for the more than 20,000 dead since the coup and for the current
attempt, by Jacques Bernard, CEP executive director and, Reginald
Boulos (OAS-financed printer of Haiti's ballots and key coup d'etat
player), et al, to rig the 2006 parliamentary elections by summarily
excluding the Lavalas and L'espwa candidates from the second rounds.
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