The burning-tire news photos from Haiti’s presidential election look horrific. After seven delays, elections finally went through in UN-occupied Haiti, and the result is a disaster.

The election was held on Feb 7, and the vote counting went through the weekend. The organizers said there would be a delay in the expected results, but people celebrated who they thought had won anyway. The expected winner had been an agronomist named Rene Preval, who was a close associate of exiled President Aristide.

Preval’s Hope party had been leading in the exit polls, but now the organizers say he got less than 50% of the vote, something that would mean a runoff next month. Preval is crying electoral fraud, and now there are riots, but Preval is appealing for calm pacific ways to show concern about this. Apparently, it’s not really happening.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa describes just why hopes were so high in this excellent essay here, and Jack Sweeney describes the implications of this disastrous unfolding mess in an essay called “No Preval, No Haiti” here.

UPDATE: Boz has more thoughts here.