In Haiti, dozens of ballot boxes found at landfill

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, South Florida Sun-Sentinel - Haiti's troubled elections were dealt another blow Wednesday with the discovery of dozens of ballot boxes and polling materials scattered across a landfill just outside the capital city.

The discovery seemed to back charges by front-runner Rene Preval that fraud and "gross errors" plagued the Feb. 7 presidential contest, though it was impossible to tell just how many votes for Preval ended up in the garbage.

"Just look at this - this is what the rich of this country think of our votes," said Renel Duqueres, a landfill worker who said he began noticing the ballot boxes being dumped last week. "They just kept coming and coming, and we burned a lot of them. But then it just became too much."

As pigs and goats rooted through huge mounds of smoldering garbage covering dozens of acres, Haitians from nearby villages waved discarded ballots Wednesday that showed Preval's box checked as an apparent vote. But some ballots showed markings for other candidates; others had no marks at all.

"This is really quite disturbing, and it looks like it's going to mess up things quite a bit," said David Wimhurst, spokesman for the United Nations, which has backed this country's interim government with a 9,000-man military force since a 2004 rebellion ousted former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

With 90 percent of ballots counted in the presidential race, Preval leads with 48.7 percent of the vote, followed by former President Leslie Manigat with 11.8 percent. Preval needs a simple majority to avoid a runoff, and he contends that the vote was sabotaged to shrink his lead.

Michel Brunache, chief of staff for President Boniface Alexandre, said on Haitian radio Wednesday that the interim government is forming a commission with election officials and Preval's aides to review allegations of vote fraud.

But no authority could say when the commission would meet or how long its investigation would last. Behind the scenes, U.N. diplomats continued to huddle with Haitian leaders and ambassadors from the United States and other countries to find a way out of the mess. Brazil, whose military leads the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti, was pushing a plan to declare Preval the winner in an effort to avoid another nationwide rebellion.

Meanwhile, the United Nations and Haiti's election council hurled charges back and forth over who had custody of the ballots.

"We were in charge of security for the votes, and we did our job. The votes under our control were handed over" to the Haitian Provisional Electoral Council, said Wimhurst. Both Wimhurst and Brunache said that the ballots in the landfill could have come from nine polling places that were ransacked on Election Day. Or, they said, they could be blank ballots dumped in an effort to sabotage the elections by discrediting them in the eyes of the Haitian public. All ballots and election materials, including unmarked ballots, were to be sealed and taken to the election tabulation center.

Among the materials discovered at the landfill by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel was a Senate tally sheet for a polling place in Carrefour, a Port-au-Prince suburb where no irregularities were reported. It was one of several tally sheets found by reporters Wednesday.

One of the names on the tally sheet was that of Jean-Herlin Beaublanc, who was an election observer for Preval's party at the polling place. "Yes, that's the tally sheet, but I don't have any idea what happened to the votes," Beaublanc said. "The whole place was a mess. It opened up five hours late, and they kicked us out in the afternoon because it was so disorganized. I didn't see what they did with the votes."

One way out of the growing crisis may be to discard so-called blank ballots - which under Haitian law must be included in the total votes cast - that were tabulated during the past week, an idea being floated by some diplomats.

Eliminating the blank ballots would reduce the total number of ballots counted, giving each candidate a larger share of the votes. If all the blanks are discarded, then Preval would win with about 51 percent of the vote, one diplomat said.

A large proportion of votes, about 4.7 percent, were blank, showing no choice for president among the 33 candidates. Though some Caribbean and Latin American countries have a tradition of submitting blank ballots as protest votes, "this was a pretty high number, and it does look suspicious on its face," said an international diplomat closely involved with the elections process. "It's hard to believe that people woke up at 3 a.m., walked five miles and stood in lines for hours to submit blank ballots.

"What we think happened is that at some polling stations the workers just tossed in unused ballots with everything else, and they got counted," said the diplomat, who didn't want his name used because of the sensitivity of the situation. "That's going to be one of the negotiating points, like everything else here," he said. "Who knows how long this could last. Nothing is ever simple in Haiti, especially at election time."