Haiti Election, Set for Sunday, Marred by ID Card Problems
With some candidates already crying fraud, and the delivery of voter identification cards mired in delays and confusion on Saturday, Haiti braced for one of its most pivotal presidential elections in decades.
Official public campaigning ended Friday, but hours before the first ballots were to be cast Sunday, many of the 19 candidates and their representatives took to social media and old-fashioned news conferences to question the election’s fairness.
The United States ambassador, while expressing cautious optimism that balloting would be fair and orderly, raised concern that many people, especially the more than one million who have been living in tent encampments scattered across this capital city since January’s earthquake, may not be aware of basic information like the location of the island nation’s 11,000 polling places.
“You have people who are registered to vote in their old neighborhoods but living somewhere else,” the ambassador, Kenneth H. Merten, said in an interview on Saturday. “I’m not sure that all of them know where they have to go. We will see tomorrow.”
“They have been doing what they can, but I am not sure that it is enough,” Mr. Merten said of the government.
With so many candidates, it appeared unlikely that any one would capture the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a runoff, which is set for Jan. 16.
The winner will confront a spreading cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,500 people since mid-October, and the complex question of how Haiti can most effectively recover from the earthquake and best spend several billion dollars of foreign aid due in the coming years.
Basic services in this, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, remain in disarray, including those related to the election, and worries abound that the succession of calamities here has sapped the will of the 4.7 million registered voters to turn out.
For many potential voters, the challenges have been steep. Less than half of the more than 400,000 new and replacement national identification cards necessary for voting are thought to have been distributed, leading to intense frustration.
People waited in long lines on Saturday to pick up new or replacement identification cards, and many people said they had already endured a confusing odyssey to apply for them.
Even Haiti requires an ID card, proving national citizenship, to vote. If there is another nation that is as careless as the USA about who is allowed to vote, I’d be interested in knowing about it.
Exit question: do you think it’s as easy for gringos on permanent vacation in Mexico to vote in Mexican national elections as it is for Mexican nationals, legal or illegal, to vote in the USA?
