HAITI VOTE TABULATION CENTER

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 PORT AU PRINCE 000249 SIPDIS SIPDIS STATE FOR WHA/CAR DRL S/CRS SOUTHCOM ALSO FOR POLAD STATE PASS AID FOR LAC/CAR INR/IAA (BEN-YEHUDA) TREASURY FOR JEFFREY LEVINE E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV PREL KDEM PKAO HA SUBJECT: HAITI VOTE TABULATION CENTER REF: PAP 0217 ¶1. Summary: On January 27 and 29 PDAS Jonathan Farrar and Charge Carney separately visited the Vote Tabulation Center (VTC),which will be the nerve center of Haiti's election results tabulation. The VTC is located roughly one km from the MINUSTAH base at the Port-au-Prince airport. MINUSTAH has fortified and protected the center with the Chinese formed police unit (FPU),MINUSTAH patrols, and checkpoints. Voting data from the tally sheets filled out in the provinces will be entered into a central database with various controls to prevent fraud and errors. Political parties, observers, and the press will all be able to observe the tabulation process from areas separated off from the main tabulation floor. The CEP must still decide when it will first publish and how often it will update results, but it will have complete control of how and when results are released. End Summary. Overview of Tabulation Process -------------- ¶2. On 27 January PDAS Jonathan Farrar with S/CRS and DRL staff visited the Vote Tabulation Center (VTC) in the SONAPI industrial park near the Port-au-Prince airport. Charge visited 29 January with Core Group Ambassadors. MINUSTAH and CEP elections officials explained to the visitors that the votes would be counted at the voting sites (BV),the ballots would be stored at secure MINSUTAH departmental compounds, and the tally sheets would be transferred to the MINUSTAH base at the Port-au-Prince airport by helicopter and truck (reftel). MINUSTAH will transfer results to the tabulation center in order to keep the CEP operators working at maximum capacity but slowly enough to avoid a backlog at the center. The CEP has not yet decided when to begin releasing results, but has proposed beginning result reporting when 20 percent of the returns are counted. When the CEP is ready to release results, the VTC will send results to the CEP press center at the Montana hotel, which will officially release them to the press. The VTC has the capacity to update results on the Internet every 20 minutes, but the CEP has not decided how frequently to release result updates. Location Details -------------- ¶3. The VTC is in a warehouse inside the SONAPI industrial park, a walled compound with limited access approximately one km from the MINUSTAH base at the Port-au-Prince airport. The VTC warehouse is adjacent to the Chinese FPU base and the MINUSTAH electoral warehouse, where MINUSTAH stores non-sensitive elections materials such as tables and chairs. (Note: Contact WHA/CAR for aerial photograph of the facility. End Note.) Some of the roughly 50 warehouse-style buildings in the industrial park contain active textile manufacturing plants, which MINUSTAH officials say they expect to be open in the days following the elections. Multifaceted Security Plan -------------- ¶4. MINUSTAH,s security plan for the VTC involves fortification, static Chinese FPU units, MINUSTAH patrols, military security for the entire delivery route from the airport, and escorts for delivering the sensitive materials. According to MINSUTAH elections officials, military engineers will connect the VTC to the other two MINUSTAH compounds with sandbags and barbed wire. The entire fortified facility will be guarded by the Chinese FPU, which has been reassigned exclusively to VTC security. Throughout the counting process, UNPOL and military units will staff checkpoints and patrol the grid of streets within the industrial park. In PORT AU PR 00000249 002 OF 002 order to safely transport results from the MINUSTAH base at the Port-au-Prince airport, MINUSTAH will transport results to the VTC under military escort. Detailed Tabulation Process -------------- ¶5. Once a batch of sealed results arrives at the VTC, CEP workers open the sealed plastic bags and separate the tally sheets from the poll worker attendance sheets. They file the poll worker attendance sheets for processing after the election and send the tally sheets to the reception area. To log in each tally sheet, the workers must enter the tally sheet number and the location of its voting site, creating a file in the database, which is not connected to the Internet and has multiple regularly-updated backups. Once the sheet is entered into the system, it is passed to a second set of operators who confirm that the sheet number and voting site location are correct. After the login is complete, VTC employees pass each tally sheet randomly to a computer operator who inputs the data from the tally sheet. From there, they pass the tally sheet randomly to a second operator at a different computer who enters the results again. The VTC then compares the two sets of results. If they match, the tally sheet is filed and stored, but if the results do not match, VTC workers pass the tally sheet back to data entry. MINUSTAH, OAS, and CEP officials have been training operators and practicing with the system and say the center is ready for Election Day. Political Parties, Observers, and the Press -------------- ¶6. The VTC has two areas for political parties, the press, and the international community that are connected to the vote counting area by controlled-access hallways to the rest of the VTC. Both areas will have access to elections results via computer. Publication -------------- ¶7. The CEP has not yet decided how long it will wait until publishing the results or how often it will update the provisional results (pending contestation). However, it appears that the CEP will first release results after 20 percent of the votes have been counted. The CEP will announce provisional results from its USAID-funded press center at the Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince. After the CEP announces results, the VTC will publish results on-line so that political parties and observers can quickly see if the results they observed at the voting sites match the provisional results. According to MINUSTAH elections officials, the CEP and VTC website will likely update results every two hours. ¶8. Comment: Problems on Election Day are unlikely to originate from the VTC itself; variations of this system have been used successfully in other Latin American elections. Security for the center should be robust. End Comment. CARNEY