Haiti Votes: Elections Scheduled, Gangs Write the Rules
Haiti's electoral commission has set December 13 as the date for national elections, but the announcement carries less authority than the gangs currently controlling an estimated 85 percent of Port-au-Prince, according to reporting by the New York Times.
Haiti's electoral commission has set December 13 as the date for national elections, but the announcement carries less authority than the gangs currently controlling an estimated 85 percent of Port-au-Prince, according to reporting by the New York Times.
The arithmetic is straightforward and brutal. You cannot run a polling station in a neighbourhood that armed groups open and close at will. You cannot campaign on streets where candidates are not the ones deciding who moves freely. Election officials say the schedule holds — experts say the schedule is a statement of intent, not a plan.
Haiti has been here before. The 2025 elections were postponed. The ones before those were postponed. Each postponement extends the vacuum, and vacuums in Haiti have a well-documented tendency to fill with violence rather than governance. The transitional council backed by the United States, the UN, and the Caribbean Community has yet to demonstrate it can deliver security in the capital, let alone across the country's ten departments.
What distinguishes this announcement is the date itself — December 13 falls inside a northern hemisphere news cycle typically consumed by year-end summitry, which means international attention will be elsewhere when the postponement, if it comes, is finally confirmed.
One country. Twelve weeks. No clear path to a ballot box that anyone can safely reach.
