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Haiti president defends questioned elections
Less than a week before balloting was scheduled, Haitian authorities postponed the country’s presidential and legislative runoffs because they said they needed to wait for recommendations from a special commission tasked with evaluating the widely criticized electoral process.
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Haiti’s election council has postponed the presidential runoff election scheduled for this Sunday, amid accusations of irregularities by opposition candidates.
Haiti has pushed back next week’s presidential runoff vote, election officials said Monday, without immediately announcing a new date. That contrasted sharply with an earlier legislative round in August that suffered from violent disturbances and other irregularities, even though global monitors said they were not serious enough to disrupt the legitimacy of the overall vote.
October’s election was staged almost five years after President Michel Martelly came to power in a country struggling to recover from the effects of the deadly 2010 natural disaster that leveled much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and left more than a million people homeless.
The investigation work was expected to complete in three days and thereafter to make recommendations to the government as well as to the electoral council to further plan on the polls.
The commission has-been rejected by the opposition. It has been dismissed as merely a “cosmetic solution” by the opposition, but Martelly says his priority is a credible final round that will be recognized as legitimate.
Since the October elections an alliance of opposition groups has demanded an independent review of the results.
Political analysts questioned whether runoff elections could feasibly take place in late December, especially when one of two presidential candidates in the runoff is alleging rampant fraud and not campaigning. Moise got 33 percent of the vote while Celestin got 25 percent. Official results have the agricultural entrepreneur, a political newcomer hand-picked by Martelly, getting 117,602 more votes than second-place finisher Jude Celestin, a former state construction chief who was the government-backed candidate in the last election cycle.
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Martelly, who is banned by the constitution from serving two consecutive terms, said that on Thursday an electoral evaluation committee would be set up to determine the way forward.