As Haiti prepares for its upcoming electoral process, the country’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) is sounding the alarm over a sharply underperforming voter registration campaign, with less than 13% of the official target achieved more than six weeks after the process launched.
Registration kicked off across Haiti on July 20, 2026, with the CEP setting an ambitious goal of enrolling 4 million eligible new voters ahead of the upcoming vote. As of the latest update on September 6, just 506,953 voters had completed their registration, equal to only 12.6% of the body’s overall target. With the registration deadline scheduled for October 13, election organizers have just 37 remaining days to reverse the trend and boost participation among eligible citizens.
To facilitate the registration process, the CEP has deployed 2,761 trained field operators across the country, alongside a network of 1,418 designated registration centers. Currently, only 1,271 of these planned centers are fully operational, a gap that may be contributing to the slow enrollment pace.
Week-by-week data from the CEP reveals dramatic volatility in registration rates since the campaign launched. The process got off to an anemic start in late July, with just a few hundred applications submitted daily. A modest uptick emerged in early August, when daily applications climbed to between 15,000 and 20,000. The highest daily turnout came during the second half of the month: the single busiest day was August 17, which saw 24,775 new registrations, followed by a second peak of 23,783 applications on August 25. Since the start of September, however, the pace has slowed sharply, falling to fewer than 3,000 new applications per day by September 6.
A breakdown of demographic data shows near gender parity among registered voters so far: men account for 50.8% of the total at 257,447, while women make up the remaining 49.2% at 248,769. By age group, middle-aged voters make up the largest share of enrollees: the 39 to 48-year-old bracket leads with 114,177 registered voters, followed closely by 29 to 38-year-olds with 110,028. Young eligible voters aged 18 to 28 have registered 79,811 voters to date, while participation declines steadily among older age groups, falling from 90,932 registered voters in the 49 to 58 bracket to just 44,034 among voters aged 69 and older.
Geographic enrollment also varies widely across Haiti’s departments. The South department has recorded the highest raw number of registered voters at 79,878, followed by the West 1 district (73,499) and Grand’Anse (62,116). At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Center and Artibonite departments have among the lowest raw registration totals, at 36,958 and 36,013 respectively. Even when measured against each department’s pre-allocated registration capacity, utilization rates remain uniformly low across the country: the Southeast department posts the highest rate at just 12.92% of its planned capacity, followed by Grand’Anse at 12.36% and Nippes at 11.78%. Artibonite has utilized less than 5% of its planned capacity at just 4.58%, while the North department hits only 4.97%.
The sluggish enrollment pace has raised widespread concerns among election observers and officials about the legitimacy and representativeness of Haiti’s upcoming electoral process, as organizers scramble to identify barriers to participation and ramp up outreach to under-enrolled groups before the fast-approaching deadline.