Oversight of Public and Private Financing of the 2015-2017 Electoral Campaigns in Haiti
Summary: An assessment of whether the campaign-finance rules were actually enforced during Haiti's 2015-2017 electoral cycle. It takes articles 125 to 135.2 of the 2015 electoral decree, which govern public and private campaign financing, and asks how far their requirements were met and what the CEP and other state bodies did to follow up. On the public subsidy, CEP officials interviewed described the grant to parties as automatic once eligibility was established, subject to signing a CEP form: of 192 parties and political groupings registered for the 2015-2017 elections, 166 were judged eligible and 145 ultimately received it.
Key Findings
- The public subsidy was treated as an entitlement rather than as a conditional grant. CEP officials described it as automatic once eligibility was established, subject to signing a CEP form. Of 192 parties and political groupings registered for the 2015-2017 elections, 166 were judged eligible and 145 received the money.
- The subsidy was paid in two tranches: 500 million gourdes for all the elections, municipal and territorial included, then a supplementary 75 million gourdes. Independent candidates received nothing, because article 126.1 of the 2015 electoral decree reserves the subsidy to parties and political groupings.
- The decree makes parties accountable for money spent by their candidates. Parties and groupings receive the subsidy on behalf of their approved candidates, and the amount depends on how many approved candidates they have, so they commit at the same time to account for how it is used.
- On private financing the study finds the reporting duties largely inert. Article 131 requires anyone giving 500,000 gourdes or more to a candidate, party or grouping to notify the CEP; article 132 requires parties to file a complete monthly list of donations and donors; article 133 requires any donation above 50,000 gourdes to be made by check or bank transfer. The report doubts that no donation exceeded 500,000 gourdes and treats the absence of declarations as an enforcement failure rather than as evidence of clean financing.
- Article 134 gives the CEP the power to complain to the judicial authorities for criminal prosecution of offenders, and the study's questions are built around whether it ever did.
- The evidence base is narrow and the report says so. It rests on a single interview, conducted on Wednesday 31 October 2018 with three CEP officials, using a questionnaire of about twenty questions on articles 125 to 135.2. Parties and the state's financial-control bodies were not interviewed, and the report notes the scarcity of available data. It presents itself as exploratory and as a basis for debate rather than as a full audit, and the questionnaire is reproduced in the annex, which makes the record valuable as an instrument even where the answers are thin.
How to cite
Observatoire Citoyen pour l'Institutionnalisation de la Démocratie (OCID), 2018, Oversight of Public and Private Financing of the 2015-2017 Electoral Campaigns in Haiti, accessed via HaitiDocs, https://www.haitidocs.org/doc/ocid-2018-financement-campagnes-electorales