PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Despite delayed start times, missing ballot boxes and attempted ballot stuffing, Haiti’s presidential and legislative runoff elections Sunday were much improved from the highly chaotic and controversial first round Nov. 28, international observers said Monday.
Supervisors working at 1,500 voting centers were better trained, polling station monitors were more mature and, despite friction between rival candidates and sporadic violence in the last few days of campaigning, the elections were “much more peaceful,” said Colin Granderson, head of the joint Organization of American States-Caribbean Community observer mission.
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The mission deployed 200 foreign observers across the mountainous nation in the closely watched election that pitted musician Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, 50, against Mirlande Manigat, 70, a former first lady and longtime opposition leader. There also were 76 legislative seats at stake.
Still, Granderson called on election officials to continue to make improvements with Haiti’s 4.7-million-voter electoral list. Frustrated voters were still turned away from polls without casting their ballots.
On Monday, political parties were assessing how their candidates performed, with supporters of both presidential camps declaring victory over the Internet. Haiti’s electoral law forbids the publishing of partial results and the joint OAS-CARICOM mission called on candidates to abide by the law. Preliminary results are due March 31, and final results on April 16.
At a news briefing in Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner commended the peaceful nature of the election. Toner, however, stopped short of declaring it “free and fair” before all the information was in.
“We’ll wait for … the monitoring teams’ full assessment,” he said. Toner said initial assessments suggest that the elections “took into consideration some of the lessons learned from the Nov. 28 elections and were largely peaceful and conducted without significant report of any wrongdoing.”
U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said she was pleased with the peaceful vote and signaled future support for Haiti.
“If we have a better government — a clean government — the United States should remain fully engaged in helping the Haitian people build up their economy,” she told The Miami Herald’s editorial board.
In Haiti, tally sheets from more than 11,000 polling sites were still making their way into the capital Monday evening, where workers at the vote tabulation center were scrutinizing them for fraud and tracking the final results.
One area that remained a debate was turnout. Both the heads of the Provisional Electoral Council and the U.N. peacekeeping mission told journalists Sunday that participation was high. But Granderson said while the participation appears to be slightly higher than for the first round — 22 percent nationwide — it doesn’t appear to coincide with the more than 1 million inquiries via telephone and text messages that election officials received from voters wanting to locate their polling stations.
“The final numbers were a bit disappointing,” he said, adding that officials will have to wait for preliminary results for the actual turnout figure.
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