The Presidential Election

Chapter 7: The Presidential Election

The Military Council

In the Military Council of Government, the ministers chosen by General Kébreau were all military officers. Right away, with the cooperation of senior officers, Kébreau took a whole series of measures to enable Dr. François Duvalier to take power. To begin with, Kébreau reorganized the Army and sidelined officers who did not fully agree with handing power to Duvalier. A series of other measures then prohibited strikes, suppressed freedom of the press, and gagged everyone to prevent them from speaking. The police could search homes and arrest anyone. As a result, they arrested and packed the prisons with many supporters of Louis Déjoie, Daniel Fignolé, and Clément Jumelle.

The Election Date

Finally, on August 2, 1957, the Ministry of the Interior announced in a communiqué that general elections would be held on September 22. There would be no advance voter registration and no electoral roll. On election day, voters would receive ballots inside their polling stations, and they could even make their own ballots if they wished. Employees would be present in every polling station to help those who could neither read nor write complete their ballots. Knowing that the Haitian Army would supervise everything taking place in every polling station on election day, one could already foresee the fraud and disorder that would mar the election. It was clear to everyone that the Haitian Army would stage a sham election and thereby hand power to Duvalier.

Jumelle Withdraws His Candidacy

Two days before the election, Clément Jumelle announced that he was withdrawing his presidential candidacy. Jumelle asked Louis Déjoie to do the same so that together they could denounce in advance the fraudulent official election the Haitian Army was going to stage to hand power to Duvalier. Déjoie refused to withdraw his candidacy and declared that he was willing to present himself as a victime de la conscience nationale, a victim of the national conscience. All of that was just pretty phrases and French rhetoric.

The Official Election Results

On Sunday, September 22, 1957, general elections were held throughout the country to elect a president, 21 senators, 37 deputies, and municipal officials. When the results were published a few days later, Duvalier was credited with 630,509 votes and Déjoie with 249,956. Duvalier thus won the election and became Haiti’s 36th president.

Irregularities in the Results

People quickly saw that the results clearly pointed to a rigged election. Many improper things had occurred on election day. On the island of La Gonâve, for example, officials counted 18,841 ballots for Duvalier and 463 for Louis Déjoie. The results of the 1950 census made it clear that La Gonâve could not have had that many residents of legal voting age. People were even more astonished to learn that Louis Déjoie, who was running simultaneously for president and for the Senate in the Southern Department, had failed to be elected first senator for that department in a region where he ruled the roost.

The Elected Deputies and Senators

What looked even worse was that all the deputies and senators who won were Duvalier supporters, with two exceptions: Amerlin Condé, elected as a deputy for Les Cayes, and Franck Séraphin, elected as a deputy for Port-au-Prince. Only those two supported Déjoie. All the rest were supporters of Dr. Duvalier.

The Army on Election Day

General Antonio Kébreau and the senior officers who supported Duvalier as he did were the ones who truly put Duvalier in power. According to reports, Colonel Franck Beauvoir spent the entire day in his office inside the Dessalines Barracks, where he had numerous telephones installed so that he could supervise and monitor how events were unfolding throughout the country on election day. Thus, as we can see, what took place on September 22, 1957, was not truly an election. It was a selection and even a masquerade, given the way the election was conducted.

A Selection

As it happened, Dr. Duvalier came to power without a genuine popular mandate. From the outset, he faced several sectors that would make life difficult for him. This led many people to believe that he would not last and that the Haitian Army would soon overthrow him. As history would show, however, after many arrests, beatings, and acts of violence, Dr. Duvalier eventually crushed them all one after another. He consolidated his base, held power for 13 years and six months, and ultimately managed to transfer power easily to his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, who at the time was a young man no older than 19.