Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council, tasked with organizing the presidential, legislative, and constitutional referendum elections that Prime Minister Henry and international partners were calling for, faced an essentially impossible assignment in 2021. Organizing credible elections required security conditions that did not exist, institutional capacity that had been depleted, electoral infrastructure that needed to be rebuilt, and civic education that could not be conducted in an environment of gang violence and displacement.
Electoral commission members acknowledged publicly that organizing elections in Haiti’s current security environment was extremely challenging, with gang control of large portions of the capital making voter registration and campaign activities impossible in affected areas. Any election that could not be held in gang-controlled territory would produce results that excluded a significant share of the population, raising immediate questions about the legitimacy of the outcome.
Civil society organizations raised a more fundamental objection: that elections were not simply a technical exercise that could be conducted regardless of context, but a democratic process that required certain minimum conditions — security, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, institutional independence — that Haiti currently lacked. Holding elections in the absence of these conditions, they argued, would produce an outcome that resembled democracy in form but lacked its substance.
The debate over elections in 2021 highlighted a fundamental tension in international democracy promotion: the desire to restore democratic legitimacy through electoral processes versus the recognition that elections conducted under coercion, insecurity, or institutional failure could actually undermine rather than restore democratic governance.