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

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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