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27471: Hermantin(News)Haiti's identity emerges as election draws near (fwd)






lhermantin@hotmail.com

HAITI

Haiti's identity emerges as election draws near

Voter IDs acknowledge citizens for the first time



By Tim Collie
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

February 4, 2006



PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Marie Therese Simplice awoke at dawn Tuesday and walked five hours through some of this city's most dangerous neighborhoods to get the card needed to vote in Haiti's elections next week.

But the desire to vote wasn't what drove Simplice to get the card. She wanted something to acknowledge the 54 years she's lived in this impoverished country of her birth. "The election is important, but it's this card I really need,'' said Simplice, a widowed street vendor, as she stood in line with hundreds of others outside the country's elections headquarters. "Everyone told me that if you're going to do anything in life, you need this card."

By Thursday, national elections officials said they had distributed 3.1 million of the 3.5 million voter cards, the first national identity cards in the country's history.

"If you include all the fraudulent documents, about 80 percent of Haitians have no reliable identity documents at all,'' said Rosemond Pradel, a Haitian who moved from Pembroke Pines three years ago to help run the Provisional Elections Council overseeing the elections for president and parliament.

"The goal from the first was to create a reliable identity card for the first time in this country's history,'' said Pradel. "How can you run elections if you can't even identify most of your electorate? We had a situation in the past where people would go to a government office and get four, five, six identity documents under different names."

Similar to an ATM card, the laminated voter card can store reams of data about an individual, Pradel said. Today, each has the photograph and fingerprint of the voter, which are to be witnessed by poll workers on election day. Because many of Haiti's parties worried about electronic manipulation of votes, the cards will not be read electronically.

Already postponed four times, Haiti's first elections since the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years ago now look like they will be held on Tuesday. Registration of voters and the distribution of the hi-tech cards have been chief reasons for the delays.

Isolated in remote mountain villages or marooned in violent urban slums, many Haitians have proved especially difficult to identify and register as voters.

More than half of Haiti's 8.3 million citizens have no record of their existence--no birth, medical, school or social insurance documents that identify them as Haitians. Censuses and land registries are unreliable, and tax rolls are flawed because of government corruption.

Over the past year, election workers registered voters by fanning out over the mountainous countryside. Often using mules to travel the poor roads, workers lugged photographic and fingerprinting equipment into remote villages. Because many rural Haitians had no identification, a local witness could vouch for their identities. And because an estimated 80 percent of the people are illiterate, personal marks were accepted as signatures, election workers said.

Once the registration photos and fingerprints were collected, the data were sent to a card manufacturer in Mexico. For the past few months election workers have been working to distribute cards to the 3.5 million registered voters. The United States and other nations have spent at least $60 million on the elections.

Unlike war-torn Iraq, Haiti has never had a permanent elections authority. With each new election, a different group has tinkered with, and often corrupted, voter rolls. The urban elites who have run the country for nearly two centuries found little reason to register voters or campaign in the vast countryside, where more than4 million of Haiti's poorest citizens live. The political and economic turmoil of the last two decades has displaced millions of Haitians throughout the country, demographers here say.

Problems with the election process do not end with the registration of voters. On election day, many may have to walk as far as five miles to reach their polling places, in part because the 804 polls are far fewer than in previous elections.

"We have a real concern with the quality of the voter lists -- the names that will be at polling places on election day,'' said Vincent de Herdt, a Haiti-based analyst with the International Foundation for Election Systems, an independent monitoring organization.

Even in Haiti's notorious Cité Soleil slum, which is so dangerous that polling places will not be set up there, thousands of poor mothers and street toughs have lined up to receive the voter cards. Few seem motivated by strong electoral passions, but all want the card.

"I want the card because it's supposedly foolproof, and you can store lots of data on it,'' said Lucio Paul, a 31-year-old mechanic who took off work and returned to the elections office several times before he received his card Tuesday.

Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4573.


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel