Prime Minister Ariel Henry dissolved Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council in October 2022, officially admitting what had been apparent for months: elections that had been promised for 2022 would not happen, and there was no credible timeline for when they could be organized. The dissolution of the electoral body established by Moïse in 2020 formalized the postponement of democratic elections indefinitely, deepening the constitutional crisis in a country that had not held elections since 2017.
Henry cited the security situation as the primary reason for the electoral council’s dissolution, arguing that organizing credible elections in an environment where gang violence controlled large portions of the territory was simply impossible. He pledged to reconstitute an electoral body and pursue a new electoral timeline when conditions permitted, but offered no specific dates or milestones.
Opposition groups and civil society organizations condemned the dissolution as evidence that Henry had no genuine intention of organizing elections and was using the security crisis as a pretext for indefinitely extending his own hold on power. They noted that elections had been delayed through multiple successive crises — political unrest, COVID, the assassination, the earthquake, the gang blockade — and argued that the pattern of delay suggested a government that found ways to postpone elections regardless of the specific pretext.
Haiti had now gone six years without holding elections since the legislative elections of 2017. The country had no elected officials at any level of government — no parliament, no local officials, no president elected by popular vote. The democratic deficit was total, and the path back to any form of electoral legitimacy was becoming harder to see with each passing month of delay.