more on the elections

I started writing this a few days ago, immediately following the elections. I got busy and sort of lost some steam, but I thought I'd share it anyway.

It could have worked. As day broke over Port-au-Prince on November 28^th, nobody knew what to expect, but everybody knew what they wanted. Chanjman, change. The date, on which Haitians took to the polls to elect their next President, had loomed large for months. Despite an increasing number of voices – including some from the candidates themselves – calling for the postponement of the elections, the Haitian government and international overseers refused to acquiesce to their requests. The elections were to go on as planned.

Our day got off to an inauspicious start. We rushed out of the house in order to get to the nearest polling station by 6:00 a.m., the scheduled opening time. We were greeted by a mass of people, already waiting in an orderly line outside the door. A good sign, I thought, until we entered the high school-turned-voting center and were faced with a different scene. In each of the voting rooms, election observers were furiously counting out ballots, apparently trying to match the number of ballots in each room with the number of people who would be voting there that day. Interspersed among election officials were mandataires, young men and women who represented each of the political parties whose candidates were running for office that day. They were there ostensibly to keep tabs on each other and their respective parties; most of them didn’t even look like they were old enough to vote. After more organizing, they finally started to let voters in the door; I saw the first vote get cast no earlier than 6:45 a.m.

We headed downtown to Lycée Toussaint L’Ouverture, another large voting center. As soon as we walked in the entrance, I was accosted by an old woman, documents in her hand. “I can’t find my name on the list,” she told me, and beckoned for me to look myself. I looked at her voting identification card and the piece of paper that both directed her to come there on election day as well as proved that she had registered to vote. I scanned the list of names on the wall. After coming up empty, I turned to one of the many Haitian election observers and asked what they were going to be able to do for her. After a shrug of his shoulders, I ascertained that this was not the first time that problem had occurred that day. “I voted here during the last elections,” another would-be voter told me, “and now I can’t find my name.” Another group of bystanders surmised that the voter lists were still populated by many of the people who were killed in the January 12^th earthquake.

Moving on, we came across a sizable demonstration crawling up Route Delmas, one of the city’s largest thoroughfares. They seemed to be heading towards the office of the Conseil Electoral Provisoire (CEP, Provisional Electoral Council), but were blocked by police before they could reach their destination. Instead, the group, which was increasing in size with each bystander that got sucked up into the high-energy crowd, ended up in front of Building 2004, a voting center located a couple of miles away in the neighborhood of La Piste. Although we never did pinpoint what triggered the ensuing melee, the end result was clear enough. Ballots and boxes were strewn everywhere, on the ground and in the creek behind the building. A pair of intimidating military teams from Israel and Italy restored order and quelled any further uprisings, but the damage was already done.

We heard on the radio that there were some problems in Corail, the sprawling, sun-baked internally-displaced persons (IDP) camp located just north of Port-au-Prince. When we arrived, however, there was nothing more than the remnants of a burned tire and a group of half a dozen local residents stationed by the entrance to the camp. When I asked what happened, they informed me that people had showed up to the voting center that morning to find a sheet of eligible voters with a grand total of 39 names. Thirty-nine names, one man exclaimed, for a camp with a population of between 12,000 and 13,000 people. When I pressed further, suggesting that the residents must have known about the registration problem beforehand, they told me that it was the first day they had seen a voter list.

On the way back to the city, more reports started to filter in. Ballot boxes had arrived at voting centers stuffed with already filled-out ballots. In other places, election overseers, after managing a legitimate voting process, opened the boxes, saw unfavorable results, and promptly destroyed the ballots. All across Port-au-Prince, centers were shutting their doors hours before their scheduled closing time, many before noon. Finally, the dagger. Twelve of the nineteen candidates had joined together for an impromptu press conference to denounce the elections and call for their annulment, citing massive fraud. It wasn’t even 2:00 p.m.

That evening, the demonstrations in the streets lasted well past sunset. Although they were peaceful, it would be unwise to characterize the protesters as content. Many took to the streets to support their candidates, but most were there to speak out against the fraudulent elections. Night fell and we headed home, but everybody knew that the story was far from over.

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It was only after a day or two that I really started to formulate some clear thoughts about what I had witnessed. I'm not a journalist, so it was a pretty novel experience for me to be chasing around news like we were doing on Sunday. It was easy for me to get caught up in the excitement of the moments, rather than placing all of the individual events into the larger context of a completely failed election.

The moment where it started to hit all of us was when we were examining the aftermath of the Building 2004 debacle. Once again, it was easy to get caught up in the moment of rock throwing and ballots being strewn all about; what really got to me, though, were all the people who stayed around after the mess to still tried to vote. I had this picture in my head of a middle-aged Haitian woman, caught in the middle of a semi-violent clash with the United Nations, with an empty ballot in her hand and a defeated look on her face. I don't think there was a single reasonable person in the country last Sunday who thought that the elections were going to be perfect, but the point to which they degenerated was, as my friend Frank put it, depressing.

Of course, the elections were flawed from the beginning, which I have elaborated on before. Personally, I would like to see the banned Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular political party in the country, be able to participate in the democratic process. So would a lot of Haitians. I was surprised, however, to hear the opinions of a lot of people who went out to vote. "Yes, we're Lavalas," a couple of young men told me at one of the voting centers, "but we're ready to try something else." They then went on to gush about Michel Martelly, or Sweet Micky, the famous Haitian musician for whom they had cast their vote. At another Sweet Micky rally, protesters began their pro-Martelly chants with the phrase, "Si Aristide pa la..." (If Aristide is not here...), a reference to Jean -Bertrand Aristide, the exiled former President and leader of the Fanmi Lavalas party. If we can't have Aristide, they seemed to be saying, then we'll settle for something else.

These, of course, were isolated incidents. There are thousands and thousands of Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas supporters that simply stayed home and refused to participate in the "selection," as Aristide himself had called the November 28th event not too long before. My point, though, is that there was a movement of people that I witnessed that, although unable to vote for their true desired candidate, were willing to participate in the process for the sake of moving forward.

I have at least half a dozen Haitian friends who went to the voting centers and couldn't find their names on the lists of registered voters. And these are people who didn't lose their houses in the earthquake, have full-time jobs, are fully literate, and have at least a little bit of money. For me, the story of this past Sunday is about those people, and how they were thwarted. Whether being witness to brazen ballot stuffing, being turned away from polls because of a registration error, or finding themselves unable to vote because of protests, many thousands of Haitian were unable to participate in that simplest democratic act. The Organization of American States (OAS) and other international observer institutions signed off on the elections, citing that the documented irregularities in less than 4% of the voting centers were not sufficient to warrant an annulment. It's a slap in the face to all those citizens who were willing to participate in a process that they knew wasn't perfect for the sake of moving forward and trying to -- just maybe -- build a better future for their country. For many, the elections could have been "good enough;" instead, they ended up being anything but.

The story isn't over. The final results will come out in the next couple of days, which will most likely result in a run-off between the two contenders who got the highest amount of votes (if no single candidate got 51% of the first round votes). Haitians, however, have been taking to the streets almost daily to protest the elections that they know have failed. International organizations, such as the OAS, have a tendency towards recalcitrance, and it's hard to imagine that they'll bend to the wishes of street protesters. However, more and more voices from outside of Haiti are coming out and calling for the annulment of the elections (see this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer or this press release by the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti). Maybe, if each one of us adds our voice, we can further the cause and help to establish a credible election process that is so much better than "good enough."