Yesterday, in a victory for democracy, Rene Preval was declared the official winner of Haiti's presidential election. This was despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration-backed Haitian elites. Preval is seen as the candidate of the poor, and was elected president once before under the banner of Lavalas, the party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Like our own dear Republicans this past November and in 2000, Preval's opponents fought hard to keep him out of office by disenfranchising the poor. They even used many of the same tricks: keeping polling locations out of poor districts, polls opening late, ballot shortages, an unusually high number of blank and spoiled ballots, twisting the rules surrounding vote counting to favor their candidates, and the outright destruction of votes.
Representative Maxine Waters speaks out today on these abuses.
First, a little background. As you may remember, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from office in 2004 in a coup orchestrated by the Bush Administration and carried out, in part, by US Marines:
In January 2004, former soldiers and other heavily armed thugs took over several Haitian cities and then marched into the capital, while the Group of 184 staged confrontational demonstrations throughout the country. On Feb. 29, 2004, U.S. Marines and embassy officials entered President Aristide's home and told him to leave immediately or he and thousands of other Haitians would be killed. President Aristide was flown aboard a U.S. plane to the Central African Republic and left there.
After the coup, the Bush Administration installed a new government, which set up a body called the CEP to manage the elections for Aristide's replacement.
After the 2004 coup d'etat, the Bush administration installed an unelected interim government led by Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who came from Boca Raton, Fla. Human rights violations have been widespread since the coup. Amnesty International has documented numerous cases of extrajudicial executions attributed to members of the Haitian National Police, and the interim government has imprisoned hundreds of political prisoners without trials.
The U.S. government promised to help Haiti organize elections in order to restore democracy. The interim government was supposed to oversee these elections. However, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), which had the responsibility for organizing the elections, did not include any representatives of the Lavalas Party, the party that represented the poor majority.
Not only was Lavalas not represented on the CEP, but various of its potential candidates were illegally imprisoned:
Several of Haiti's political prisoners could have run for office if they had not been in jail. Yvon Neptune, the former Prime Minister of Haiti, and Annette August, a popular Haitian singer, have both been detained illegally for over a year. Both are prominent members of President Aristide's Lavalas Party, but neither was able to participate in the elections.
The government, however, took it upon itself to provide Lavalas with a candidate:
Ironically, the Lavalas Party did have a candidate in the presidential election. The interim government certified a local politician named Marc Bazin as the Lavalas' candidate for president. This would be comparable to the U.S. government arresting John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean before the 2004 New Hampshire Primary and then letting the Republican Party choose a Democrat to run against President Bush.
When the elections finally arrived, they would have made
Kenneth Blackwell proud:
Finally, the elections took place on Tuesday, Feb. 7, and they were rife with impediments to voting, especially in poor neighborhoods. Numerous polling stations opened several hours late because election workers did not show up on time or did not have the proper supplies. At one polling station outside of Cite Soleil, thousands of voters arrived hours before the polls were scheduled to open at 6 a.m., but they still had not cast a single vote by 11:30 a.m., because the election officials did not have any ballots.
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The CEP refused to place any polling stations in several of Haiti's most impoverished areas, including Cite Soleil, a home to over 60,000 registered voters. It was a blatant attempt to disenfranchise the poor.
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Despite all of the obstacles, voters lined up and waited for hours, determined to exercise their democratic rights.
And exercise them they did:
Early results showed an overwhelming victory for Rene Prval, the candidate with widespread support among the country's poor. Many polling stations posted their results the day after the election, and Prval won between 60 percent and 90 percent of the vote in all of these polling stations. By Thursday, the CEP was reporting that Prval had 61.5 percent of the votes counted thus far. The candidate in second place, Leslie Manigat, had only 13.4 percent. A sample of the results by the National Democratic Institute predicted that Prval would win the election with 52 percent to 54 percent of the votes, and a survey by the Organization of American States showed Prval with an estimated 55 percent.
This was not acceptable to the CEP, which responded accordingly:
The anti-Aristide elites reacted to the news of Prval's decisive victory by trying to steal the election. Evidence of election fraud was abundant. For example, hundreds and possibly thousands of burned ballots marked for Prval were found in a garbage dump. On Feb. 12, Jacques Bernard, the executive director of the CEP and a longtime opponent of President Aristide, miraculously discovered Prval's lead had dropped below the 50 percent required to avoid a runoff in March.
The counting rules used by the CEP seemed to be designed to deny Prval a victory. About 125,000 ballots, or 7.5 percent of the votes cast, were declared invalid by the CEP because of alleged irregularities. Another 4 percent of the ballots were allegedly blank but nevertheless included in the vote count, thereby making it more difficult for Prval to exceed 50 percent.
Sounding an awful lot like
Greg Palast, Representative Waters exclaims:
Who in their right mind would believe that 4 percent of the electorate would get up early in the morning and wait for hours outside of polling stations that failed to open on time in order to cast a blank ballot?
In the face of international criticism, however, the CEP finally backed down:
Yesterday, as Haitians demonstrated in support of Rene Prval and international observers examined the charred remains of ballots found in a garbage dump, the CEP and the interim government finally agreed not to count the so-called blank ballots. Excluding them from the vote count brought Prval's share of the votes up to 51.15 percent, and Prval was declared the winner of the presidential election, nine days after the votes were cast.
Score one for democracy in the Americas. Let's just hope that the Bush Administration and the Haitian elites give him enough breathing room to govern effectively.