Going to Great Lengths to Vote in Haiti

Haitians wearied by spiraling unrest and gang violence turned out in huge numbers Tuesday to choose a new president and parliament and perhaps put their impoverished Caribbean homeland on the path to some prosperity and peace.

Clutching her newly printed voter identification card, Marie Vincent, 20, a resident of Cite Soleil, the Haitian capital’s most notorious slum, arrived at her polling station at 3:30 a.m., 2 1/2 hours before it was scheduled to open. Late in the morning, she was still waiting.

“I’m ready to spend the entire day here,” Vincent said. “Because we want change in the country.”

“We have tens of thousands of people outside some polling stations. Huge numbers,” said David Wimhurst, a spokesman for the United Nations, which provided security and technical aid for the election.

“Sometimes they get unruly, but most are waiting patiently.”

At one polling station in a vehicle registration bureau near Cite Soleil, thousands of people angered by the seemingly endless wait banged on the gates in frustration, then stormed the building.

Elsewhere, people in line were trampled by other would-be voters frantic to cast their ballots. According to local news reports, one person died of a heart attack, another of asphyxia.

In Bel Air, another Port-au-Prince shantytown, thousands of protesters waving their ID cards shouted in anger over the long lines and waits.

Technical and organizational glitches, including election workers arriving late or tardy deliveries of ballots, led to delays in opening polling stations, especially in Port-au-Prince, Wimhurst said. “It took far too long in some cases.”

But by midday, the U.N. spokesman said, those problems appeared to have been resolved. In the afternoon, long lines had formed again outside the vehicle bureau that was the scene of the morning riot.

And Haitians who had feared the possible repeat of a 1987 bloodbath, when a gang armed with machine guns and machetes killed at least 20 would-be voters, breathed easier.

Thirty-three candidates were vying to become Haiti’s first popularly elected president since Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The former priest and populist firebrand once enjoyed the backing of the United States but was driven from power in early 2004, accused of corruption and political thuggery. Aristide now lives in exile in South Africa.

Since his departure, Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, has been ruled by an interim government and plagued by violence and disorder that have paralyzed commerce. In the slums, heavily armed gangs routinely clash with U.N. peacekeepers, and the crack of gunfire is heard daily. Kidnapping has become a common, and profitable, business.

The presidential front-runner is Rene Preval, 63, Haiti’s president from 1996 to 2001 and a former Aristide ally. His bright yellow campaign posters were a common sight in Haiti’s squalid slums and poor rural areas.

Preval’s political foes, including members of the country’s business elite, were worried that he could be a stalking horse for Aristide.

Also running were Guy Philippe, who led the armed rebellion that drove Aristide out of power; Leslie Manigat, a political scientist who was president for five months until a 1988 coup and was seen as the leading choice of the business sector; and Marc Louis Bazin, a former prime minister.

If no one wins a majority, a runoff between the two top finishers will be held March 19.

It could take days to count the votes. Roads and communications in Haiti’s mountainous areas are often primitive, and ballots in some remote locations were to be collected by muleback.

For four years, Haiti has lacked a functioning legislature. Voters also were choosing among candidates for 129 parliamentary seats.

The election had been postponed four times because of security and organizational problems as well as squabbles within Haiti’s Provisional Election Council.

To ensure that the casting and counting of ballots were fair, the 9,300-member U.N. peacekeeping force was deployed to protect polling places and to escort votes as they were brought to Port-au-Prince for tabulating, Wimhurst said.

The force “will do all it can to support the Haitian authorities in ensuring that the vote is held in freedom and safety,” pledged U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

More than 92% of the country’s electorate of 3.3 million had received voter ID cards, but election officials still were unprepared for them in many places. In Petionville, one of the choicest of Port-au-Prince suburbs, thousands of people were milling around the central square at midday, still waiting to vote at one of four polling stations. The election council extended polling hours to accommodate the crowds.

Authorities said they had put no voting stations in violence-plagued Cite Soleil for safety reasons, though some Preval supporters argued that this decision was a gambit by their foes to cheat them.

To make sure that their vote counted, many in the seaside slum, home to 60,000 registered voters, rose before dawn and walked trash-strewn, rutted streets to the places they were supposed to cast their ballots.

Josepha Manlet was in line outside her polling station by 4 a.m.

“You can’t sleep in Cite Soleil,” she said. “Bullets are flying all over.”

“I’m voting for peace,” Manlet said, by which she meant Preval, who has pledged to jail the gang bosses believed to be behind the crime wave in the capital.

A history of dictators, deposed presidents and the dashed hopes of the Aristide era have turned many Haitians into political cynics. But Tuesday’s turnout, and the determination of ordinary people to have their vote count, provided a glimmer of hope.

Angeline Macet, 55, of Bel Air, got in line outside her polling station at 5 a.m. and was still there five hours later. Her back was hurting from standing so long, she said. But she was bent on casting her ballot.

“I’m not going home,” Macet said.

A Haitian American specialist on the country’s politics said it remained to be seen whether an election could help cure Haiti’s many ills.

“The past two years have been for the vast majority of Haitians, and not just the poor, a nightmare, economically and also in terms of security,” said Robert Fatton Jr., a political science professor at the University of Virginia. “It doesn’t appear that anything has changed for the better.”

However, antipathy toward Preval in the business community and middle class runs so deep that even if he wins, many Haitians might refuse to recognize him as president, Fatton said.

“Today the system is in crisis. It’s not clear that we can extricate ourselves,” Fatton said. “On the other hand, we’re so close to civil war, it could be possible that whoever wins will benefit from a period of goodwill.”

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Times staff writer Dahlburg reported from Miami and special correspondent Regnault from Port-au-Prince.