The OAS observer mission in 1990 was filled with administrative problems and inter-ethnic and racial tensions. The OAS budget, funded by the United States, was only a quarter of that of the United Nations, too small to develop an effective administrative structure or to support a permanent French-speaking staff. The OAS delegation’s leadership, drawn from Elections Quebec, was somewhat hostile toward the U.S. observers representing the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and this undermined their effectiveness as well (Fisler 1994).
Haiti’s pivotal elections support the proposition that international actors generally, and election observers in particular, can induce and help sustain democratization by maintaining a comprehensive presence during an election campaign and through periodic mediation of post-election disputes. Foreign involvement has proved vitally important for Haiti’s nascent democracy because it has provided its budding civil and political societies with some degree of security and confidence (Doyle 1997).
Yet the view among Latin Americanists that “demonstration elections” (Herman 1984) and “electoralism” (Karl 1986) promoted from outside can do harm as well as good also holds true to some extent in Haiti. The essentially electoralist policies pursued by the United Nations and the United States in Haiti in 1990 did not provide for any openness about electoral shortcomings. Nor did they provide for human rights monitoring during election campaigns. The report by Haiti’s Commission for Truth and Justice was prepared hastily and superficially by Latin American standards; completed after only a few weeks of interviewing in the summer of 1995, it still has not been publicly released. There has been no public listing or purge of human rights violators in the military, and former Tontons Macoutes and demobilized military personnel often threaten the exercise of civil and political rights with impunity (Wilentz 1989). Activists from the Duvalier dictatorship were barred from participating in politics from 1987 to 1997 based on constitutional Article 291 rather than the recommendations of the Truth Commission report. This action excluded these individuals from any national reconciliation process and encouraged them to engage in disloyal politics, including the 1991 coup against Aristide .
International involvement produced only one respectable voter turnout, in 1990. In successive elections, turnout ranged between 5 and 25 percent of registered voters, so low that it undercut popular perceptions of these elections’ legitimacy (IRI 1997). Similarly, international efforts on other fronts also produced few tangible results. Unsuccessful U.S. efforts to mediate an end to the 1997 election boycott produced intransigence in Parliament. Despite repeated visits by U.S. officials, like former national security adviser Anthony Lake, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and even U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Haiti has not been able to confirm a replacement for Prime Minister Rosny Smarth, who resigned in June 1997 over the CEP’s failure to correct election irregularities (Haiti Info 1997). The only significant mediation effort involving political parties occurred in the spring of 1998 under the auspices of the IRI. However, some of the twenty Haitian parties participating in the IRI sponsored pact were linked to terrorism and/or the Duvalier dictatorship. It will require much more effective mediation to bring the country’s disparate political parties back into electoral competition for the general elections in the year 2000.
Despite the United States’ substantial investment in the assistance and oversight of Haiti’s four sets of post-Duvalier elections (about $1 per voter for electoral administration, and between $2 and $4 per voter for international observation), electoral administration remains a serious problem. This country case suggests that credible elections in traditional societies that lack functioning institutions, especially political parties and NGOs, must sometimes be limited to the simplest contests of all, the direct election of a president and proportional representation elections for the legislature. Legislative and local races often cannot be independently verified; in the absence of either a rationalized bureaucratic state or an autonomous political or civil society, the task is too complex. Haiti’s electoral councils have not performed well, even considering the difficult circumstances under which they operate. There are too many similarities between them and other inefficient, corruption-ridden state agencies to make the CEPs a credible enforcer of the integrity of competitive elections (Karl 1986).
Nor have the country’s political elites and foreign election observers convened to decide what can be done to raise Haiti’s electoral conduct closer to universal standards for minimally fair elections. Ironically, the absence of clear evidence of centrally coordinated fraud has left foreign observers and many of Haiti’s political parties in a quandary about how to respond to the CEP’s incompetence.
Although one hesitates to conclude that a country is not ready for democracy, it does appear that Haiti requires a clearer consensus among elites and a longer period of economic modernization before it can stage fully free and fair elections (Doyle 1997). For this reason, international actors should work to establish a consensus within Haitian society in favor of elections before they agree to monitor future votes. When the United States invaded Haiti in 1994 and reinstated democracy, not all the country’s political elites were yet ready to accept the most basic electoral ground rules (Fisler 1995).
Throughout the 1990s, Haiti’s elections have been conducted with an eye to their impact in the United States. Domestic political actors have always been careful to satisfy the U.S. interests, inside and outside of government, that backed their country’s involvement in Haiti. Nevertheless, these same U.S. interests have been discouraged by the fact that the presence of international monitors in Haiti has not led to the formation of a competent, independent electoral administration or a functioning party system. Their perception that foreign monitoring appeared to work in Haiti in 1990 1991 encouraged external actors to ignore problems that arose again in subsequent elections. These problems were later condemned in the 1995 and 1997 elections (Doyle 1997).
In 1990, most of the world was overjoyed that Haiti was able to hold any election at all. The situation changed dramatically in 1995 (IRI 1997). In an attempt to increase their political capital, Republican members of the U.S. Congress attacked the Clinton administration’s post-invasion project in Haiti, especially problems associated with the 1995 and 1997 elections. The effort did not give the Republicans the political advantage they desired, but it did strengthen the hand of those among Aristide’s domestic opponents who wanted to discredit these elections. Ironically, by exaggerating the CEP’s very real problems and political parties’ weaknesses, foreign observers undermined Haiti’s weak democratic institutions and reinforced the self-fulfilling tendency of many Haitians to assume that it is futile to try to construct a functioning democracy in the country.
The principal dilemma in contemporary Haiti is that most of civil society remains clearly behind Aristide, but most of political society (especially his erstwhile political allies) scorns him (IRI 1997). Although Aristide’s opponents probably would draw only limited support in any open election, at this point the international community does not seem much interested in assuring that Haiti’s elections are credible, especially if their main result is to produce either a one party system dominated by Aristide or a
two-party system consisting of two Lavalas factions, as has existed since the 1995 elections (IRI 1996). Ironically, the United States’ insistence that Aristide step down after completing his term in February 1996, strengthened Aristide’s popular appeal. If he had remained in office for an additional three years, his reputation might well have suffered as a result of the usual disadvantages of incumbency, especially in light of the country’s turbulent government.
In 1990, foreign election observers in Haiti faced a dilemma that is common in the Americas. Haiti’s constitution is both federal and semi-presidential. This situation made the 1990 elections ambitious not only in terms of security and credibility, but also in terms of the sheer number of offices contested (Pastor 1995). Yet foreign observers focused on the presidential race, in part because Aristide was one of the candidates and in part because this was the only contest in which the vote could be verified. Haiti’s frail NGOs and political parties, the weakest in the Americas, have not been able to verify any of the election results produced by the country’s ineffectual Provisional Electoral Councils. Because neither NGOs nor parties were able to conduct parallel counts, quick-count sampling was the only tool available to foreign observers. Yet samples are only useful when election results are not close, as in the direct vote in the 1990 presidential election. They are impractical for Haiti’s plurality elections in Chamber of Deputies and Senate districts because too many statistically representative samples would have to be taken (Trouillot 1995). By overestimating the value that the 1990 presidential election held for Haitians, international actors inadvertently reinforced centralization of power in the country, thereby undercutting the decentralizing goals of the 1987 constitution.
One of the strengths of foreign election observers is that they can speak out to an international audience when they find shortcomings that can be corrected, thus helping a country that is not yet ready to hold free elections. Unfortunately, they can also overlook or exaggerate anomalies, in effect camouflaging the country’s true state of electoral readiness. This latter situation is what has occurred in Haiti. By applying a lower standard for democratic elections, foreign observers in 1990 1991 taught Haiti’s political society in which electoral transparency and enforcement of election rules can be ignored. Then, by exacerbating the problems that arose during 1995 and 1997, they encouraged Haitian political society to blame most of the country’s electoral shortcomings as deliberate fraud. This lack of honesty on the part of international observers has created an impression of decentralized fraud committed by competing legislative candidates, along with centralized fraud by an electoral commission that has been controlled by Aristide forces since 1995. Like El Salvador and Nicaragua, Haiti requires a permanent electoral commission capable of institutionalizing its relations with foreign observers, who can then help meet the many administrative needs that exist and cooperate with political parties to develop much stronger independent vote verification capabilities (Herman 1984).
In the absence of an institutionalized party system, it is unclear what claims Haiti’s parties and elected leaders have on each other, or whether it is possible to develop the consensus necessary to implement various constitutional mandates. Although ex- president Aristide continued to govern from behind the scenes with his ally Pr val as president, he lacks support from parties other than his own. Few among the political elite are willing to take orders from him because he still is perceived as unwilling to engage in consensual decision making. The 1995 and 1997 elections only produced a decimated party system and a temporary electoral commission that lacks a national census from which to rest