Elections 2010
At what cost – economic and political?
Unfortunately, Haiti Grassroots Watch could not obtain the exact financial cost of the past 23 years of elections in Haiti.
According to the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, which follows elections, government costs range from as low as US$1 per voter for countries with a long history of elections, to up to US$45 per voter in “transitioning” countries, like Cambodia.
In Haiti, the 2005 voter registration and elections cost somewhere between $49 million and $70 million (depending on whose figures one trusts), meaning they cost up to US$30 per voter, according to one report.
The 2009 Senate elections cost US$16 million, according to press reports.
The budget for the current elections is US$29 million, with most of that coming from overseas. The OAS/CARICOM Elections Observation Mission, headed by Colin Granderson – which will have about 100 observers in Haiti on Nov. 28 – cost an extra $5.3 million, according to one report. (Granderson would not divulge the budget to Haiti Grassroots Watch.)
Giant campaign billboard dwarfed by a mountain of garbage in Petion-ville. Photo: Acessomedias
According to media reports, of the US$29 million, some US$7 million came from the state coffers, with almost US$1 million going to help finance the presidential candidates, because each presidential candidate approved by the CEP gets US$50,000.
But a glance at the posters, television and radio advertising and the candidates’ travel schedules makes it clear that many are spending far more than $50,000, meaning that, as Remy noted, once elected the new president will not represent those who voted for them.
Granderson admits that elections in Haiti “cost more and more money,” and that there is “an americanization with all the posters” and advertising, but at the same time, he noted “we have elections where many of the candidates are not well known. How else will people get to know them?”
Is Haiti headed towards a big-money American electoral system? Washington has certainly been working towards that for over 30 years.
In addition to the funding for the formal elections process – voter registration, voting offices, tabulation centers and candidate funding – foreign governments and agencies, especially American, have spent many more millions on political “education” and party-building since 1987.
France, Canada, and especially the US and its subcontractees – like the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republic Institute (IRI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and an alphabet soup of other agencies, overt and covert – have poured millions into Haiti in order to “encourage” democracy. Their websites give a few details on their recent work, but these articles offer a much more balanced view of the breadth and depth of the foreign intervention...
"In the aftermath of the invasion"
"Democracy Enhancement" by Noam Chomsky
US and other diplomats have also intervened directly into the formal electoral process. Many have written about US intervention into the 1990 electoral process, and of course the US involvement in 1991 coup d’état against President Jean-Betrand Aristide is also well-known.
Remy experienced intervention directly when he headed Haiti’s CEP in 1995 and objected to various demands made by the US government, including the fact that the 1995 ballots were to be printed in California.
“It was a classic case of foreign intervention,” Remy recalled.
“Haitians are always worried about the Haitian government’s meddling in the electoral process, and it does happen! But what is more intolerable is American intervention.”
Clinton and Aristide in 2003. Photo: Daniel Morel
According to Remy, President Bill Clinton and other US authorities pressured Aristide to take Remy off the CEP.
“They even told [Aristide] that all of the US aid and cooperation to Haiti would be reconsidered,” Remy remembered. “After weighing the pros and the cons… I resigned. That’s intervention.”
What alternative and what are the challenges?
Maybe American-style electoral races and “bourgeois democracy” answer for Haiti?
According to diplomats like Granderson and politicians like Préval, the current system with its costly elections are the way to go.
“It’s been 23 years since the Duvalier dictatorship, and 23 years of political instability, and even if, in the NY conference, donors said they will send millions to Haiti, if we don’t have stability, we won’t have the conditions to develop the country,” President René Préval told journalists last spring.
But the president nearly contradicted himself. The 23 years of “democracy” haven’t yet delivered that stability or the “development” so earnestly sought after. What’s to say the 2010 elections will deliver anything different?
Haiti’s “dependent, comprador capitalist society, based on import-export… has shown what it can deliver, and it can’t deliver anything different than misery for the Haitian people,” according to Remy.
“Even if [candidates] are of good will… they can’t bring about any change in [the system]. We must do away with this system” he said and he added that “dropping a piece of paper in a box is not democracy.”
Popular displeasure and cynicism in Chomèy.
Like many others – individuals as well as organizations – Remy says structural change is crucial, and as far as elections go, he would only support them as part of “real” or “popular democracy,” where the population participates in more than once every four or five years.
Out in Chomèy, 69-year-old peasant Joseph Chostèn, thinks candidates should be chosen by grassroots organizations and that they ought to have to sign a contract where they promise to abide by the organizations’ wishes.
“And if the person doesn’t do what we sent him to do, we would have the right to sue them in court, and that is how we would assure we get a real change,” said Chostèn, a member of the Bainet Organizations Collective.
Joseph Chostèn, 69-year-old peasant.
Chostèn’s ideas aren’t far off from the definition of “popular democracy,” according to Remy, where organizations maintain control over the representatives they have elected and have the right to recall them more than once every four years.
But to Remy, the deeper question is not just what type of elections or political representation, it is the “restructuring of Haitian society.”
Fifty-three years after Fignole was chased from power and 24 years after Duvalier left, is that still possible?
“There’s an author who once said – ‘Human beings never create a problem they cannot resolve.’ So, the problem we are facing, it wasn’t created by Legba, it wasn’t created by Jesus Christ, it wasn’t created by Allah. It’s us Haitians who caused it. So, it’s also us who will develop the capacity to resolve it.”
In spite of the skepticism of Remy, of many popular and peasant organizations, of a series of political parties and of other national and international actors, the November 28 elections will take place.
Whichever politicians are elected, they will face giant challenges – perhaps the biggest challenges faced by the Haitian people since 1804.
Saddled with an economy which was already in a state of crisis before January 12, now Haiti is facing:
- A cholera epidemic
- A destroyed capital city
- More than one million people virtually living in the streets, under tents with no plan in sight,
- Many millions of people who need real jobs, not “cash for work,”
- And a series of foreign actors, both inside the government and as part of what is called the “non-govenrmental organization” (NGO) sector, who are operating in Haiti, working towards their own objectives.
Haiti Grassroots Watch will continue to dig into these questions and into many others in an attempt to help the Haitian people and all people and organizations working for justice and for the respect of all human rights in Haiti see more clearly.
Read Anselme Remy's thoughts on the 1990 elections
Return to Introduction and the video
