The Vote is In

Yesterday we attended the annual meeting for ODD (Organization for the Development of Desarmes). They're one of MCC's partners here; they also plant trees, work with irrigation, and are trying to get a trade school off the ground.

At this meeting, they needed to vote in some new board members and new members for the oversight committee. After a long period of people nominating others (or themselves), we eventually had 7 candidates, 5 men and 2 women, for 3 open positions. Each candidate had three minutes to promote themselves before the election. Following the speeches, there is a brief silence and all heads look to us. I must have missed the announcement that they needed voting monitors. They thought we would do just fine.

A stack of notecards was produced, and I thought, "oh, those are the ballots and you write in the name of the person you like and that's that" -- nope, not quite that simple. The notecards were indeed for the candidates, but there was no writing in. Four candidates were represented by colored cards, one by bottlecaps, one by pebbles, and one by cardboard.

So into a dark hallway we went, with a basket at our feet. Each person came in to cast up to three votes, once for each open position. Theoretically, a person could toss in 1 pink notecard, 1 bottlecap, and 1 piece of cardboard. We were there to make sure they put in no more than three votes. We asked if someone could use all three of their votes for the same person, and one of the ODD officials said, surprisingly, "yes, that's not a problem." Well, it turns out that someone did cast three votes for one candidate -- it actually was Mr. Bottlecap, the candidate himself!

We emerged from the dark hallway with the basket of votes and hoped no rocks fell through the cracks as we carried it over. After we sat down, we asked Jean-Remy if it really was OK for one person to vote for the same candidate three times. His eyes widened, he clarified our butchered Kreyol and said "no, that is not allowed" -- paused and said, "We'll wait and see how the vote turns out. If there's a problem will address it later."

So the votes come in: 49 votes for Pink Notecard, 47 votes for Blue Notecard, and 29 votes for Bottlecap (ah! He's in 3rd place!), 4 votes for Cardboard, 17 for Pebble, 19 for White Notecard and...22, 23, 24, 25....votes for Green Notecard. So close! Mr. Bottlecap only wins by a hair if you take away his two illegal votes. Thrilling.

We thought it was a pretty ingenious way to allow people who may be illiterate to participate local politics, and we were impressed that they took it so seriously.