Haiti parties demand review or suspension of CEP membership verification ‘fiasco’

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Haiti’s political parties are calling on the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) to suspend or review its membership-verification process, which they say is rejecting valid identification numbers and placing some members on the lists of parties they never joined. The complaints are adding to concerns about the CEP’s ability to complete the verification process and keep the Dec. 13 election timetable on track.

The dispute centers on the requirement that political parties and coalitions prove that they have at least 30,000 affiliate members before they can register for the elections, Haiti’s first national vote in a decade.

For one, the Fusion of Haitian Social Democrats (FUSION) party, led by former Senator Edmonde Supplice Beauzile, said in an Aug. 27 statement that its members had encountered problems during verification.

“Several hundred FUSION members have already had their data rejected, their NINU [Unique National Identification Number] declared invalid, or been flagged as already registered with another political party,” the party representative said.

FUSION claimed that some of the affected members include coordinators, members of its general secretariat and members of its executive directorate who had never authorized another political affiliation.

The party also said identification numbers rejected by the CEP system were recognized as valid by the National Identification Office (ONI). It called for the publication of the CEP-ONI validation protocol and sanctions for anyone found to have fraudulently used voters’ personal data.

The allegations come as the CEP works to verify about 3.15 million political affiliations — 30,000 members for each of the 105 parties and coalitions cleared to participate in the elections.

The verification process began after candidate registration opened on Aug. 20. The CEP initially set Oct. 2 as the deadline for completing the process but has extended it to Oct. 14, according to a Sept. 2 note from the electoral council.