The OAS mission which was put together after the preliminary results prompted allegations of fraud and corruption and sparked riots across the country, ruled out a new election or recounting of votes.PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, – A leaked report on Haiti’s disputed presidential elections contains a recommendation that the candidate of the ruling party be eliminated from a run-off vote, paving the way for popular musician Michel ‘Sweet’ Martelly to get another shot at becoming Haiti’s next President.
Martelly had been eliminated when preliminary results released early last month by Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) put Mirlande Manigat in the lead, followed by President René Préval ‘s handpicked candidate Jude Celestin. But the report of an expert mission from the Organization of American States (OAS) challenged those reports, indicating that while Manigat had 31.6 percent of the vote, Martelly actually had 22.2 percent and Celestin trailed with 21.9 percent.
The report has not yet been submitted to the Haitian authorities. In fact, the OAS released a statement yesterday indicating that it would hand over the document in another few days, to comply with President Préval’s wish not to discuss it in the midst of commemorations of the first year of the devastating earthquake that affected the country on January 12, 2010.
“Under these circumstances, and taking into account that the wishes of President Préval are completely justified, we quickly tried to put together a new schedule, and I believe it can take place in the next few days,” it said.
However, the Washington-based think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) which earlier this week recommended that there be fresh, fair and free elections, because the November 28th poll was “fatally flawed”, has published a leaked version of ‘Organization Of American States Expert Verification Mission President Election – First Round 2010 Final Report’ on its website and criticized the OAS document as "inconclusive, statistically flawed, and indefensible".
The OAS mission which was put together after the preliminary results prompted allegations of fraud and corruption and sparked riots across the country, ruled out a new election or recounting of votes.
A joint OAS-CARICOM election observer mission had previously concluded, right after the election, that although there were irregularities there were not enough to affect the outcome of the poll.
However, the OAS expert mission said in this latest report that after “a thorough statistical analysis”, which included examining a sample of the tally and election result sheets, it could not support the CEP’s preliminary results.
New election ruled out
Among the findings were signs of altered official result sheets from individual polling stations, missing tally sheets and voters lists and the use of incorrect election procedures.
Despite the problems, the report said, a new election should be ruled out.
“The irregularities identified most profoundly affected the candidacies of the first, second and third place presidential candidates in the first round,” it said.
“The Expert Mission believes that a new election would involve more contests and candidacies than the evidence warranted. Furthermore, it would subject the Haitian people to a further lapse in constitutional governance, impose new campaign expenses, and diverting scarce resources both from the treasury of the Government of Haiti and international assistance would otherwise be directed into humanitarian relief, and reconstruction programming.”
The mission also eliminated the option of organizing a presidential election in problematic areas, for similar reasons. It was also concluded that a nationwide recount of presidential ballots was not a feasible option.
Ahead of the second round elections, the report advised, the CEP should undertake several improvements, including: implementing an immediate public education programme to inform electors where they are on the voters list and where their polling station is located; replacing polling station workers where irregularities were discovered and retraining retrain poll workers; increasing training of security officers to properly document incidents; and creating a more transparent process at the Tabulation center.
“The OAS Expert Mission recognizes that these recommendations do not completely remedy everything that went wrong on November 28. They cannot bring back the lost votes of those destroyed polling centers. They cannot entice citizens to brave the potential violence, organizational disarray or even the discouraging words from those presidential candidates for whom they would have voted,” the team acknowledged.
“Nevertheless, the Expert Mission believes that the immediate implementation of these recommendations will at least partially rectify the consequences of the problems and outright fraud on Election Day and the above recommendations will begin to restore the confidence of the Haitian people in their electoral process.”
OAS severely criticized
But the OAS has come in for stinging criticism from the CEPR for not recommending a completely new poll.
“This report can’t salvage an election that was illegitimate, where nearly three-quarters of the electorate didn’t vote, and where the vote count of the minority that did vote was severely compromised,” said Mark Weisbrot, CEPR Co-Director and co-author of the report, ‘Haiti’s Fatally Flawed Election’ which was released Sunday.
The CEPR further argued that there was no basis for the OAS report to rule out the possibility of fresh elections.
“For example, the missing tally sheets came from areas that had a different distribution of votes than the average for the country as a whole – one that favored Celestin,” it said. “CEPR’s analysis found that if the missing tally sheets had a distribution that was the same as the other tally sheets that were received from the same areas, then Celestin would have finished second, rather than third.”
The CEPR also said that the OAS analysis was methodologically and statistically flawed in numerous other ways. The think tank drew reference to its own analysis, which examined all of the 11,181 tally sheets and subjected each of the vote totals of the top three candidates to a statistical test to look for irregularities, while noting that the OAS team only focused on tally sheets that had unusually high voter participation levels.
Weisbrot also noted that the small margin of difference between Martelly and Celestin in the OAS’s recount – 0.3 percent – was too small to statistically distinguish between the two, given the sample size and variance.
“This appears to be a political, and not a professional, decision,” he added.
The CEPR insisted that the OAS report cannot help determine the outcome of the first round of Haiti’s election.
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