More photos here.

The failed state of Haiti, which has only been able to maintain minimum order because of UN occupation and a transitional government, held its first presidential election on Feb. 7 following the exile of former President Aristide. The frontrunner Rene Preval, favored by the country’s impoverished masses, was winning handily with well over 50% of the vote while his nearest contender barely broke ten. His lead quickly diminished mysteriously and accusations of fraud began to fly. The shit hit the fan as violent protests in support of Preval began to break out.

No election is perfect, not even in the United States. But accusations of fraud in failed states are especially common, though in many cases it turns out to be true. And many times not even just in failed states; take Ukraine for example! So call it populist or call it as you see it, but it looks like it certainly isn’t being made up. The UN has found hundreds of ballot boxes smashed in a garbage dump. And they’re finding that most of them were marked for Preval.

U.N. officials sent troops to a garbage dump near the Haitian capital to collect hundreds of smashed ballot boxes and vote count material on Wednesday, more than a week after Haiti’s disputed presidential elections.

Associated Press journalists saw hundreds of empty ballot boxes, at least one vote tally sheet and several empty bags, numbered and signed by the heads of polling stations, strewn across the fly infested dump five miles north of the capital.

“That’s extraordinary,” said U.N. spokesman David Wimhurst.
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Ambassadors from countries “directly involved in the crisis” were discussing a Brazilian plan to persuade the other candidates to recognize Preval’s victory and thus prevent a mass uprising, according to Marco Aurelio Garcia, foreign affairs adviser to Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

In New York, the U.N. Security Council urged Haitians to respect election results and refrain from violence, and it extended the Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti for six months, until Aug. 15.

Haiti’s interim government had ordered the count suspended with 90 percent of the votes tallied, pending a review of vote tally sheets by an investigative commission representing the president’s office, the electoral council and Preval’s party.

When you’ve got this kind of proof, the jury won’t be out for long. Beside the ballot boxes, there were many other suspicious circumstances surrounding the vote counting process. For example, over 125,000 of the 2.2 million ballots cast were cancelled because of “irregularities,” most of them going to Preval. That’s a lot.

Also, over 4% of the ballots cast were blank, an extremely high and unlikely number. Because Preval would have to get 50%+1 of the votes to become president, this 4% makes it that much harder to obtain the outright majority and avoid a run-off. It highly likely, when doing a comparative analysis of the situation in Haiti to other countries in the world, that many of these blank ballots were stuffed in at some point. The entire situation is completely suspicious.

My biggest problem is the trust put in the hands of the central election commission to tabulate the results without skewing them. These commissions are well-known to be biased and outright criminal — from Ukraine to Georgia to Venezuela. Yet, when Preval decided to challenge the vote counting process, it was ruled that the challenge would not go before the Supreme Court — obviously a much more honest venue — but instead before the very electoral commission that is being accused of fraud!

Let’s hope that this so-called “Brazil Plan” can work and that all other parties accept Preval’s victory. It is pretty obvious, despite whatever policies he has that I might disagree with, that he is the winner in this election. We sometimes forget that just next door is a country that lives in chaos and that it risks remaining in that state if a government cannot come to power with the legitimacy of the people.