Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Haiti’s general elections, including the selection of a president, which had been scheduled for Jan. 8, have been postponed for the fourth time, this time indefinitely.
Haiti’s Provisional Elections Council, or CEP, postponed the election on Friday and said it was unable to set a new date at the time.
“There is no realistic date for the elections,” CEP councilor Patrick Fequiere told EFE after the Friday meeting at which all of the country’s political parties agreed to call off elections once more.
Fequiere explained that CEP cannot set a date because many logistical problems still need to be solved.
The head of the National Council of Political Parties, Osner Ferry, who was at the meeting, called for dissolving CEP.
“In the interest of the Haitian people, CEP must be dissolved,” he told EFE, describing CEP members as “incompetent” and lacking “credibility.”
Ferry also called for “nationalizing the election process” by excluding the United Nations and Organization of American States from the task of preparing the elections.
The top problems appear to be the location of polling places and lack of voters’ registration cards, as well as the low percentage of eligible voters who have picked up the ones that have already been issued.
To date, only 2.5 million of the 3.5 million voter cards the OAS was to have made for distribution among the eligible population have in fact been issued.
Of the 2.5 million, only some 500,000 have been picked up by voters at centers designated for that purpose, meaning that fewer than 20 percent of eligible voters are prepared to cast their ballots.
At the current rate of manufacture and distribution of the cards, fewer than 30 percent of voters would have been in possession of the IDs by Jan. 8.
In addition, the voting centers established by the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH, do not correspond to where their listed voters live.
The OAS’ and MINUSTAH voter lists, used to organize the polling and later tally the votes, do not agree.
All the parties are complaining that they have not received their share of the 55 million gourdes (nearly $1.5 million) the government promised them for their election campaigns.
Many of them said that without the funds they would not have been able to dispatch their observers to the polling centers on Jan. 8, and under those circumstances would have refused to accept election results.
Recently, provisional Haitian President Boniface Alexandre expressed his fear that the “constant postponements” would “undermine the population’s confidence” and called the repeated delays “unacceptable.”
Alexandre called on all the organizations involved in the election process to draft a plan with a “realistic timetable” and “definite dates.”
The fresh postponement has led to a cooling of relations between CEP and the OAS, which blame each other for the glitches.
Meanwhile, the state of the country’s security has deteriorated appreciably in recent days, with a series of kidnappings, including those of three OAS employees, Haitian police said.
Since March 2004, Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has been governed by an interim government led by Alexandre and Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who took office days after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide went into exile.
