Haiti
Description of Electoral System
(courtesy of IFES election guide)
The President is elected by popular vote to serve a 5-year term. In the Senate, 30 members are elected by majority vote in single-member constituencies to serve 6-year terms. One-third of the Senate is elected every two years. In the Chamber of Deputies, 99 members are elected by popular vote to serve 4-year terms.
Recent Elections
Legislative Election, 2nd Round 2009
None of the candidates in any of the departments managed to get more than half of the votes in the first round, so the two candidates in each department were set to face each other in a run-off on 7 June 2009. This was on 13 May 2009 announced postponed to 21 June 2009, due to legal problems with election challenges.
Legislative Election, 1st Round 2009
Senate elections for a third of the seats in Haiti were held on 19 April 2009. Voters are to renew ten out of the thirty seats in the Senate, but because of resignations and one member of Senate's death in a car accident, there will be twelve open seats instead. Voting for the empty seat of Ultimo Compére in the Centre Department had to be rescheduled after voters ransacked the polling places and a poll supervisor was shot in Mirebalais. Results took a few days, since they were all to be tabulated in Port-au-Prince and therefore ballots had to arrive there before being counted. Turnout for the first round was 11 percent. According to the final results, including the annulment of illegal votes, eight political parties had candidates for the second round.
Past Elections
Presidential election were held, after various postponements, on 7 February 2006. Former president René Préval won over 50% of the vote. According to initial results Préval did not gain more that a necessary 50% to avoid the secon round of election. After several days of protests the provisional results were amended an Préval was declared a new president of the country.
Delayed parliamentary election were held on 7 February and 21 April of the same year. Lespwa won the 23 of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, Fusion Social and Democratic Praty gained 17 and Christian Union Party w12 seats.
In election to the Senate which took place at the same dates as parliamentary election Lespwa won 13 seats out of 30.
Source: Turner, Barry (2007): The Stateman´s Yearbook 2008, Macmillan, Singapore
Preval Supporters Infiltrate by Robert Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.