Haiti’s Presidential Elections
AAAGH! Election time!
Here we are in the United States, nearly 12 full months before we cast our ballots and nearly everywhere we turn, we see, hear, and receive phonecalls “from” the candidates. Three Democrats, fourteen Republicans, and one Green Party candidate are persistantly vying for our attention. I suppose if my glass were half full, I would feel honored and immensely empowered because my vote is so important. But on this point, my glass is half empty. We have hardly even gotten started and instead of feeling honored and empowered, I feel inundated and irritated.
Before I cry into my coffee too much, however, I must recall the election run-up that we witnessed in Haiti. We were there in early October, a mere two weeks before their preliminary presidential elections. Yes, you read that correctly. Preliminary. There were 54 presidential candidates in the running, a situation which usually necessitates a run-off, unless by some miracle, a majority is won by someone in the first round. The run-off elections were already tenatively scheduled for Dec. 27th.
One of the more clever and artful of the zillions of campaign ads on the streets of Port-au-Prince.
I didn’t listen to any Haitian TV or radio while I was there, and hadn’t read up on the elections beforehand, so I had formed no opinions about which candidate might prove to be the next president. However, the enormous amount of street signage lead me to conduct a very unscientific experiment. No Gallup pollster worth his salt would ever rely on my methodology, but what the heck. Based on the huge number of times Jude Celestin appeared in my hundreds of photos of that trip, I predicted that he would be the winner, and that Jovenel Moise, who appeared almost as frequently in my photo record, would finish well.
Now, a little over a month later, it turns out that I’m not so far off. Because of the complicated and somewhat convoluted (to put it mildly) calculations of the Oct. 25th election returns, the early results have just been announced. Out of the 54 Haitian presidential contenders, the candidate backed by the current government, Jovenel Moise actually won the greatest margin in the preliminary race with 32.8% of the popular vote. Jude Celestin came in second with 25.3%. So I got it backwards, but out of 54 possibles, I called the top two. Not bad!
Smiling faces of presidential hopefuls cover every available surface.
(For more election results, click here.)
So what does my experiment suggest for the current candidates in our country? Crank up the laser printers! Simultaneously, we voters can look forward to a landscape filled with signs of the candidates displaying their winning-est smiles for months to come, along with our honor and empowerment being constantly and steadfastly reassured – assuming our glasses are half full, of course.
Contributed by Linda for It’s Cactus