This is a Joke Right.

You may remember the country called Haiti which suffered a devastating earthquake in January 2010 but was unable to do anything about it because of Presidential elections scheduled for November 2010. That election failed to produce a conclusive result so the reconstruction effort had to be further delayed until a run-off vote could be held in January 2011. This election was then further delayed until the Organisation of American States (OAS) could complete a report into the fairness and accuracy of the November 2010 vote. That report has now been published;
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/OAS-Haiti-2011-1.pdf
and although I only received it this morning it doesn't take long to realise that it's not worth the paper it's printed on.

The first problem is that it didn't look at any of the actual votes cast. Instead it only concentrated on the reports of results from the counting stations known as Process-Verbaux's (PV's). Of these a full 9.3% were missing meaning that they'd either been stolen by street gangs who went around smashing up polling stations and intimidating voters or had been destroyed by election officials who didn't like the result. The report authors simply ignored these missing results and didn't bother to investigate what had happened to them even though there was clear anecdotal evidence that these street gangs were linked to two of the Presidential candidates; Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly.

Of the PV's that they did have access to the report authors discovered that 1% showed voter participation of over 100% which is clear evidence of fraud by ballot stuffing. They also determined that 2% of the PV's showed voter participation of over 75% which although not evidence of fraud in itself is suspicious when the national average voter turnout was on 22.8%.

After a small sample study the OAS decided to flag any PV that showed over 50% voter participation and any one candidate receiving more then 150 votes as suspicious. This was a very strange criteria to use because 50% participation is more then double the national average of 22.8% and you would expect to see higher rates of voter participation in densely populated areas close to the capital and in less populated, rural areas that were unaffected by the earthquake. Likewise at a polling station where 1000 votes were cast you would expect that at least one candidate would receive more then 150 votes but at a polling station where only 200 votes were cast it would look very suspicious. So the report authors seem to be saying that they were prepared to permit a certain level of fraud in certain areas.

After these 454 quarantined PV's were re-assessed the report authors decided to exclude 234 and allow 220 of them with little explanation of why some were acceptable and others were not. For the 234 areas that had their results thrown out the report authors conducted a statistical analysis of 311 of the PV's that hadn't been flagged as suspicious and used it to formulate a guess of what the results might have been. These made up results were then imposed on the 234 areas.

The most worrying finding of the report is that by far the highest proportion of irregular PV's - those which were either missing or showed evidence of ballot stuffing - occurred in the Aribonite and Nord districts. Haiti's cholera epidemic began in the Aribonite district and both it and the Nord district have seen the highest incidence of rioting and disorder fuelled by RNDP rumours that the outbreak was started by their INITE rival. Therefore these districts should be considered target areas for the Manigat campaign where votes for Jude Celestin are least likely to be tolerated. Mirlande Manigat and the RNDP refused to co-operate with the OAS in their compiling of the report.

Based on the report and it's omissions it seems to me that the authors would have had no other option then to conclude that due to the chaotic nature of the November 2010 vote and the time constraints placed on them they are unable to comment on the accuracy of the vote. Instead they've decided to conclude that Jude Celestin should be replaced by Michel Martelly in the run-off vote by a margin of just 0.3%. So it seems that the OAS are telling the Haitians that they can only choose between the two candidates that are the best at corruption, something which does not bode well for the nation's future.

If the failings of this report can be summed up in a single paragraph it comes on page 16 where it's stated that "There were 19 candidates contesting for the presidency, demonstrating an active and robust support for elections as the instrument to determine executive governance." This is incorrect. The fact that there were 19 candidates only demonstrates that in the minds of most Haitians the term "President" still translates as "the guy who gets to steal the money."