The Transitional Presidential Council approved an electoral decree and calendar in December 2024 that scheduled a first round of elections for August 2026 and established the legal framework for organizing Haiti’s first elections since 2017. The approval was a significant political milestone — the first concrete electoral timeline with a formal legal basis that Haiti had produced in years of discussions about the path back to democratic governance.
The December 2026 second round and January 2027 final results dates embedded in the calendar reflected an ambitious but realistic assessment of what could be accomplished if security conditions improved sufficiently to make elections feasible. The conditionality on security improvements was explicit in the announcement — the timeline was contingent on progress that the Kenya mission and Haitian police needed to deliver in the intervening months.
Electoral experts who reviewed the calendar noted both its ambition and its uncertainties. Organizing credible elections in Haiti required voter registration that gang territorial control had prevented, civic education campaigns, political party organization, candidate vetting, and logistics for polling in all departments — all of which required security conditions that did not yet exist in much of the country.
Haitian civil society organizations welcomed the electoral calendar as a needed marker of political direction while emphasizing that its realization depended on a security improvement that remained the central challenge. They called for the electoral process to be designed with the highest standards of inclusivity — ensuring that women, youth, and communities in gang-affected areas were not excluded from participation — and warned against elections that produced democratic form without democratic substance.