January 09, 2011
Today we released the full report of our independent recount of vote tally sheets from Haiti’s November 28 presidential election. It found massive irregularities and errors in the vote tallies, including that 11.9 percent of tallies were not counted, while 8.4 percent were irregular. The report concludes that based on the numbers of irregularities, it is impossible to determine who should advance to a second round. If there is a second round, it will be based on arbitrary assumptions and/or exclusions.
“The amount of votes not counted or counted wrong in this election is huge – much larger than has been reported by either the Organization of American States or the Provisional Electoral Council,” CEPR Co-Director, and co-author of the report, Mark Weisbrot stated. “I don’t see how any professional observers could legitimately certify this election result.”
As the paper notes, the number of votes not counted actually is far more than has previously been stated by the OAS: “Nearly 4 percent of polling place tally sheets used to calculate the results were thrown out for alleged fraud at the tabulation center, [OAS Assistant Secretary General Albert] Ramdin said.”
The OAS is expected to announce the results of its recount as early as today, and Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive has reportedly said “his government was striving to leave a stable country for the next administration and will accept the results of the …re-count that is expected to be completed in a few days.” Meanwhile, the U.S. government signalled on Friday that it may support throwing out the November 28 election entirely depending in part on the OAS’ conclusions:
Cheryl Mills, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, said the U.S. is waiting for the 12-member election team from the Organization of American States to finish its report, expected next week. Mills said U.S. officials will evaluate any steps deemed necessary by the panel.
“If the OAS mission concludes that cancellation or redo … needs to be considered, we obviously would be interested to understand how they came to those conclusions,” Mills told reporters.
The U.S., then, “would want to review whether or not those conclusions were ones that we, too, could support,” she added. “Those are the things we’d be willing to entertain, though I wouldn’t be able to tell you what we are going to do until we know what they conclude.”
Will the OAS announce similar conclusions, or will it effectively validate an inherently flawed election that banned over a dozen political parties, saw 12.7 percent of the vote not counted, and had very low voter participation, with just 22.9 percent of registered voters having their vote counted? Will the OAS make an arbitrary assessment as to which candidates should advance to a second round, or will it support an elections do-over?
