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[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

  JD Lemieux   lxhaiti@yahoo.com
 Toronto Star

Préval's lead big for Haiti presidency
Feb. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM
REED LINDSAY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR


PORT-AU-PRINCE?The chief of a Canadian-led
observation mission in Haiti yesterday praised
this week's elections as the desperately poor
nation's best ever, despite two months of delays
and massive lines that kept people waiting hours
to vote.

"These were better than anything they've done in
Haiti in the past," said Jean-Pierre Kingsley,
chairman of the International Mission for
Monitoring Haitian Elections and Canada's chief
electoral officer.

"The Haitian people have pronounced themselves
freely and massively. They have put their hope in
democracy and the electoral process allowed this
to happen. They overcame the technical
difficulties."

Kingsley discarded the possibility of fraud.
"That word hasn't even been pronounced, " said
the Canadian, who recently observed elections in
Iraq. "No one has accused anyone of anything.
This is an incredibly good sign."

Last night, the first official partial count
showed favourite René Préval had a significant
lead.

The elections were delayed for months and marked
by partisan battles among electoral council
officials and by bickering among the electoral
council, the Organization of American States and
the United Nations.

Predictions of election-day violence and disaster
never materialized, as Tuesday, Haitians stood
outside polls in lines numbering in the
thousands.

OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza
estimated that two-thirds of all registered
voters cast ballots.

In neighbourhoods close to Cité Soleil, where
armed slum dwellers often clash with UN
peacekeepers, polls opened more than three hours
late. Protests erupted as angry voters denounced
the decision to relocate their polls as a ploy to
disenfranchise them.

Kingsley criticized the lack of privacy when
voters were casting ballots and delays in opening
polls, but said such missteps were not unusual
given the difficulty of training 40,000 poll
workers in "a day or two."

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