Aid State by Jake Johnston

Author:Jake Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

20

THE ELECTORAL TEST

The polls were late to open, but before they had officially closed, it was clear the election had been a disaster. I pulled into the Damien voting center, one of the nation’s largest, just as a plainclothed man with an automatic weapon casually got into a crowded SUV and left the premises. Inside the gate, three Haitian National Police officers sat in the shade. All fifty-one voting booths had been destroyed, and lunch-pail-like ballot boxes and the thousands of ballots that had once filled them littered the courtyard. The ballots themselves looked like the board in a game of Guess Who? In Cité Soleil, where the Damien center was located, more than two dozen candidates were competing for the position of deputy, including Vladimir Jean Louis for PHTK, whom local residents blamed for the violence. Of the 17,000-plus votes that were counted in Cité Soleil, he officially received 373.

Reports from all over the country made clear that polling center violence and intimidation was a problem not confined to the capital. In Chansolme, in Haiti’s rural northwest, a polling place supervisor was forced to hide under a bed for hours after being threatened by armed individuals. They needed his signature to officially endorse the stack of already filled-in ballots they had brought. In the Nippes department, another supervisor was held at gunpoint and forced to sign a document canceling the election for an entire voting center. In the small town of Desdunes in the Artibonite, all five voting centers were shut down by midday.

As word spread over local radio, many potential voters stayed home. The expected crowds that often form after church lets out never materialized. There were structural barriers as well. In the promised land of Canaan, the sprawling informal suburb of Port-au-Prince where more than three hundred thousand had moved since the earthquake, there wasn’t even a single voting center. Tap taps, motos, and other transportation were banned on election day. Many residents of the capital, when they discovered where they had been assigned to vote, simply had no way of getting there. Hundreds of thousands across the country never even had election cards; the national ID system that donors had spent tens of millions reforming still contained untold numbers of those killed in the earthquake, while remaining out of reach for far too many of the living.

Soon after polls officially closed, however, the president of the electoral council announced that the day had been a success. A local coalition of observers, led by Rosny Desroches and funded by the US and other donors, offered up a largely positive assessment as well. The verdict from the OAS was clear. While noting “some incidents of violence,” the observer mission hailed the election as “a step forward for Haitian democracy.”1 Soon thereafter, the EU agreed. Yes, there were some problems, the EU noted, but nothing that would undermine the legitimacy of the vote itself. Official results were still more than a week away.

If the first leg of the electoral marathon had been a test, it failed any reasonable democratic standard.

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