Rules governing the operation of electoral-material reception centres

The CEP's rules on how electoral-material reception centers operate. The Council establishes one reception center per department to take in electoral material from every voting center in the department, move sensitive material rapidly to the Vote Tabulation Centre, and pass on material destined for the departmental and communal electoral bureaux. At the reception center the material is the responsibility of the departmental electoral bureau, which holds custody until final transmission. Observers may attend, on prior notice to the bureau and to a maximum of two.

The rules enumerate what counts as sensitive material, which is what makes them useful: ballots, signature lists, the records of the count and of irregularities, incidents and shortfalls, counting sheets, supervisors' preliminary reports and the transmission slips from voting center to supervisor and from supervisor to the tabulation center. Non-sensitive material is booths, urns and anything else the CEP supplies to voting bureaux. Before transmission the principal supervisor packs the material in the presence of party agents and observers: everything bound for the tabulation center goes into a large sachet sealed with a red seal, and the originals of the records destined for the departmental and communal bureaux go into separate sealed and identified transparent envelopes.

The material travels to the reception center in a convoy under Haitian National Police escort. On arrival the supervisor hands it to the departmental bureau's representative against a transmission slip in duplicate signed by both parties, and that representative may on no account open the envelopes; the sensitive material moves on to the tabulation center immediately. The document carries no date; the year given is when the CEP published it online.