27811: Chamberlain (news) Haiti vote count grinds to halt with fraud probe (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

  (Updates with demonstration, U.N. Security Council appeal)

     By Joseph Guyler Delva and Jim Loney

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb 15 (Reuters) - The counting of ballots in
Haiti's presidential election ground to a halt more than a week after the
vote as electoral authorities on Wednesday bowed to a demand by the leading
candidate for a fraud inquiry.
     Thousands protested after charred and still smoldering ballots were
found on a garbage dump in Port-au-Prince, reinforcing the claims of fraud
leveled by Rene Preval, a former president opposed by the same wealthy
elite who helped drive Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile two years ago.
     With 90 percent of ballots counted, Preval held an insurmountable lead
at 48.7 percent, just shy of the simple majority needed to avoid a runoff
in March in which several of his rivals have vowed to join forces to defeat
him.
     Michel Brunache, chief of staff for President Boniface Alexandre, said
the interim government had asked the Provisional Electoral Council not to
publish final election results until a commission composed of council
members and aides to Preval had reviewed Preval's allegations.
     "We have people who are angry, who are ready to set the country on
fire," Brunache said.
     How long it would take to conduct a review of the vote count was
unclear.
     But the review alone was not enough to prevent street protests, as
happened on Monday, when Port-au-Prince was brought to a standstill by
angry Preval supporters and impromptu roadblocks.
     Crowds poured out on Wednesday from slums like Cite Soleil and Belair,
where Preval has won the same passionate support among Haiti's poor masses
that formed the backbone of Aristide's political power.
     Waving the burned ballot papers and ballot boxes found in the garbage
dump, the protesters chanted, "Look what they did with our votes," as they
marched past the U.S., Canadian and French embassies.
     Brazil, whose military is leading the U.N. peacekeeping force in
Haiti, urged that Preval be declared the winner, for fear the situation
would deteriorate.
     "Considering the existing climate in the country, that would be the
best solution," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's chief foreign
relations adviser, Marco Aurelio Garcia, told reporters in Brasilia.
     The U.N. Security Council also reiterated a call for calm and called
on the authorities to fully investigate the fraud charges.
     Preval said on Tuesday that only "massive fraud" had kept him from
winning an outright first-round victory. He provided no details, nor
evidence.
     A distant second to Preval, with 11.8 percent, was Leslie Manigat,
another ex-president whose brief tenure in 1988 -- as has been the case all
too often in Haiti's two turbulent centuries of independence -- was
interrupted by a military coup.
     Max Mathurin, president of the electoral council, said he hoped the
commission would rapidly resolve the controversy.
     "If there's fraud, it happened at the level of the polling stations,
not at our level," Mathurin told local radio.
     A large proportion of votes, 4.7 percent, were "blank," showing no
choice for president among the 33 candidates. But they were included in
accordance with the law in the total votes cast and therefore reduced the
final percentage allocated to each candidate. Had the blanks not been
included, Preval would have held more than 51 percent.
     While blank votes are a common way to express a protest vote in
sophisticated democracies, few in Haiti can imagine large numbers of their
countrymen walking several miles (km) to polling stations and then waiting
in line for up to eight hours simply to leave their ballots unmarked.

     (Additional reporting by Irwin Arieff, United Nations)