PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Seeking to defuse the violent protests that have shut down this country for two days, Haiti’s electoral council promised Thursday to rapidly review the widely mistrusted preliminary results from the presidential election last month.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Fires still burned and streets remained barricaded in Port-au-Prince on Thursday after Wednesday's violent protests.
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Editorial: Haiti’s Clouded Election(December 10, 2010)
Even before the council’s midday announcement, a cool, steady rain and a popular candidate’s exhortation for calm had dampened the demonstrations that rocked Haiti on Wednesday. But the country remained shuttered and volatile, with fires still burning, streets barricaded and violent skirmishes between political camps still flaring.
Acknowledging that Haitian voters had expressed their “manifest dissatisfaction,” the electoral council invited the three top vote-getters, along with national and international election observers, to participate in an audit of the vote tally sheets.
But the three candidates, each of whom had questioned the results, were not quick to embrace the invitation. Michel Martelly, a singer whose partisans have dominated the street protests, said through a spokesman that he did not want to participate in an audit or file a legal challenge unless the election board’s leaders stepped down.
“You don’t report a theft to the thief,” said the spokesman, Damien Merlo.
The candidates’ skepticism did not bode well for an easy resolution of the electoral crisis that has paralyzed Haiti or for a return to what passes for normal life in a country still recovering from a devastating earthquake and grappling with a raging cholera epidemic.
The Nov. 28 election was marred by problems, and before the polls closed, 12 of 18 candidates demanded it be voided because of what they said was widespread fraud.
In the results released Tuesday night, Mirlande Manigat, a university administrator and former first lady, came in first, while Jude Célestin, the chosen successor of the departing president, René Préval, came in second. Mr. Martelly came in third, missing a runoff election by only a few thousand votes.
Some of Mr. Martelly’s supporters said they would not stop demonstrating until they got what they wanted: “At this point, all we want is for Micky to be president,” said Desly Stacy, 33. .
Colin Granderson, chief of the electoral observation mission jointly run by theOrganization of American States and the Caribbean communities, said the “wafer-thin difference between No. 2 and No. 3” suggested that an audit could change the results.
The deadline for legal challenges to the results was supposed to be Friday, but Mr. Granderson said that the electoral council was essentially contesting the results on behalf of the candidates.
He said the review was unlikely to be a full recount. He said he expected that the candidates, if they agreed to participate, would suggest which tally sheets to review based on the polling stations where they suspected fraud.
Residents of some neighborhoods in this capital city were busy on Thursday sweeping and scrubbing to clean up after Wednesday’s protests, and bulldozers were removing barricades from some main access roads.
But in mid-afternoon, a fresh pool of blood near the central Champ de Mars attested to continuing violence.
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