As Haiti moves closer to its long-awaited general elections, the country’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has released a comprehensive progress update confirming that multiple critical pre-election milestones have been successfully reached as of September 21, 2026, putting the electoral process firmly on track.
Voter registration, the foundational step of any democratic election, kicked off in a phased rollout earlier this year. The process launched July 20–21 across nine of Haiti’s ten administrative departments, expanding to the most populous West Department on July 30. Today, registration operations are active across every region of the country, with 1,285 official Registration and Polling Centers (CIVs) open and serving voters nationwide. Five departments — Grand’Anse, South-East, South, Nippes, and North-East — have already surpassed a 95% operational rate for their CIV networks, with 117, 132, 168, 105, and 104 functioning centers respectively. In the West Department, 148 centers remain open daily to process new voter registrations and update electoral roll records.
Two months since the launch of voter registration, more than 628,755 eligible Haitians have been officially added to the national electoral roll. This figure accounts for more than 10% of all potential voters, defined as citizens in possession of a valid national identification card. Regional participation varies, with South-East, Grand’Anse, and Nippes posting the highest registration rates to date: 16%, 15%, and 14.5% of their respective voting-age populations have completed the process.
Beyond voter enrollment, the CEP has wrapped up another pivotal phase of pre-election preparations: the accreditation of political parties and groupings, followed by a public random draw to assign official campaign numbers to all approved entities. To date, 30 authorized political entities — 18 established political parties and 12 ad-hoc political groupings — have successfully submitted their required documentation, including rosters of members, adherents, and supporters, through the CEP’s official candidate registration platform. As of the update cutoff date, the platform has already recorded 7 presidential candidacies, 162 senate candidacies, 419 candidacies for the Chamber of Deputies, 162 for municipal council seats, 180 for CASEC positions, and 89 for ASEC posts. The digital candidate registration and document submission window, which opened August 20, will remain open to applicants until October 9, 2026.
Human resourcing, a often overlooked but critical component of successful election administration, has also advanced substantially. The CEP has already completed recruitment and training for 2,853 Electoral Registry Agents (ADRE) and 4,643 Electoral Security Agents (ASE), who will manage on-the-ground operations on voting day. Separately, on September 17, the electoral body concluded a series of specialized training workshops focused on electoral dispute resolution. These sessions trained more than 1,000 electoral law commissioners and electoral judges across nine departments, ensuring that the legal framework for addressing voting irregularities and candidate challenges is in place ahead of the poll.
The CEP reaffirmed in its statement that it will continue full-scale work to finalize all components of the electoral machinery, keeping the process on schedule for the upcoming elections.