27881: Sajous ( comments & news) Haiti elections follow-up (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Sajousp@aol.com


I find it interesting that Mathurin said in  this article that 4% of the
votes were missing which means approximately 197,000  votes. I had estimated
173,000 missing in my analysis.



Haiti election authority says  fraud tainted vote



By Joseph Guyler DelvaFri Feb 17, 2:50 PM  ET


Haiti's presidential election was tainted by signs of fraud including blank
ballots that represented a third of the votes cast in some polling stations,
electoral authorities said on Friday.
The conclusion of fraud served as a defense of the Provisional Electoral
Council's decision a day earlier to hand the election to Rene Preval, a
champion
of Haiti's poor who had complained over the ballot irregularities. The
finding  conflicts with statements from some international organizations.
In addition to the blank ballots, in other polling stations the number of
ballots left over at the end of the day was less than the number of people
who
had voted would indicate.
"The blank ballots were probably introduced into the ballot boxes in a
fraudulent manner," Max Mathurin, president of the electoral council, told
Vision
2000 radio, "This looked weird," he said.
It was the council's first public acknowledgment that the February 7 election
 was tainted by what Preval called massive fraud.
The council on Thursday morning gave the election to Preval after he
complained about the large number of ballots that had been left unmarked by
voters.
The total number of blank votes amounted to between 85,000 and 90,000,
Mathurin said, out of 2.2 million votes cast.
The blank ballots reduced Preval's vote share to less than the majority
needed for a first-round victory. Several of Preval's rival candidates had
earlier agreed to join forces against him in the event of a second round.
Blank ballots are a common way to express a protest vote in established
democracies. But few Haitians believed that their fellow voters were unable
to
find a suitable candidate among the 33 rivals running for the presidency.
Nor was it likely that all those people would have walked miles (km) and
waited in line for hours, just to leave ballot papers unmarked, Mathurin
said.
The discovery of half-burned votes, many cast for Preval, on a garbage dump
in Port-au-Prince fueled suspicions and the final straw was when the council
discovered the large numbers of blank votes in some polling stations --
numbers  it could not believe were legitimate.
"In some polling stations, blank ballots totaled a quarter of the votes, and
in some others, one third of the votes," Mathurin said.
He blamed polling-station workers, who were often all of the same political
persuasion.
He also said that 4 percent of votes could not be  found. Preval was granted
a first-round victory with 50.15  percent after 96 percent of ballots had been
counted.
Some international organizations said the election was clean.
"There was no fraud," Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the
Organization of American States, said on Thursday. "The votes were properly
counted,
and despite some reports, there should be no talk about fraud and  nobody can
prove there were irregularities."







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