Haiti Election Offers Voters No Choices

There were no poll watchers. There were no opposition parties. There was no opposition candidate. And no opposition voters could be found.

The only audible voices belonged to Haiti’s ruling Lavalas Family: local election officials, party workers and other loyalists of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who proclaimed the onetime Roman Catholic priest’s party “a heavenly spirit” and its victories a “message that made God smile.”

That’s how Haiti held its second and final round of national elections Sunday in the isolated precincts of this dusty, mountainside town--and indeed, throughout much of the impoverished country--ending an attempt at democracy that the U.S. State Department last week called “incomplete and inadequate” before it even began.

Shrugging off harsh criticism from Washington, the United Nations, France and Canada--along with formal boycotts by all opposition parties and international poll watchers, who concluded that the May 21 first round was flawed, unfair and even illegal--the government defiantly pushed through the last phase of a vote that is likely to render this Caribbean nation a virtual one-party state.

Official results from Sunday’s runoff for just over half the 83 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the legislature’s lower house, will not be known for about a week. Turnout was vastly lower than the 55% who voted in May. But most analysts said the final outcome of the long-delayed two-step balloting--which cost American taxpayers $23 million to stage on top of a $2.3-billion, U.S.-led military intervention to restore democracy in Haiti--was a foregone conclusion.

Even before Sunday’s vote, Aristide’s party had won an overwhelming majority of the nation’s Senate seats and municipal governments after a campaign marked by killings and intimidation and a first-round ballot count that the nation’s chief election official said violated Haitian electoral law.

So contentious was that counting method--and so determined was the government of Aristide’s handpicked successor, President Rene Preval, to use it--that former Election Commission President Leon Manus not only resigned but fled the country in fear for his life.

“At the top governmental level, unequivocal messages were transmitted to me on the consequences that would follow if I refused to publish the false final results,” Manus declared in a statement after arriving on U.S. soil last month.

“This situation left me no other choice but to temporarily leave the country to avoid the worst and restrain the storm.”

But a storm of protest did ensue, from Washington and other key capitals, that will determine whether Haiti’s newly elected government should receive more than $500 million in desperately needed international aid. The grants and loans were frozen when Preval dissolved parliament and began ruling by decree 18 months ago.

The Organization of American States, which was authorized to monitor the elections, announced its boycott of Round 2 on Friday. So did all the key opposition parties. Also last week, senior State Department officials strongly hinted that Haiti could well be denied the future financial assistance if the first-round votes are not recounted, a prospect that Preval himself has ruled out.

Beyond the international largess at stake for Aristide, who is widely expected to run and win a presidential election later this year, there is his image as a populist democrat. He was Haiti’s first freely elected president, overthrown in a 1991 military coup and returned to office by the U.S. military in 1994.

At the front lines of Sunday’s vote, though, none of Aristide’s party faithful seemed to care what anyone outside Haiti was thinking.

“I believe Haiti is its own country. We have our own culture, our own way of doing things,” said Frantz Saurel Douze, the supervisor of a hillside polling booth of wood and straw overlooking the town center.

Douze, who is also the first cousin of the boycotting opposition candidate for deputy from Cornillon, added: “I think the Lavalas Party has a heavenly spirit, and even though Haitian people are illiterate, they’re not stupid. . . .

“We’re Haitians. Haitians can solve their own problems.”

Douze’s assistant, Leveille Decharnel, said voters felt compelled to choose the Lavalas candidate because “they take care of us, so now we have to do the favor back.”

At the next polling station down the “road,” a pitted ribbon of gullies, boulders and ponds that is Cornillon’s sole link to the outside world, Ynela Dorcee, homeless at 45, conceded that few among her acquaintances even understand elections.

“We have a lot of problems,” she said. “We’re hungry. We don’t have hospitals. And we don’t have any responsible authority--that’s why we don’t have these things. So that’s why we vote.

“But really, it’s all up to God.”