The new charter takes elections out of the army's hands

In Haiti the power that decided who governed was the power to run the vote. The constitution put to the country on 29 March 1987 took that power from the army and handed it to an independent electoral council. More than half the electorate turned out and over ninety nine percent voted yes, in a poll that foreign observers judged fair. The text was published in Kreyol as well as French so that ordinary voters could read it, and a former minister remarked that Kreyol had become the political language. Anticipating what was coming, the council promoted Williams Regala to general, bringing the number of generals over an army of seven thousand five hundred men to seventeen. Meanwhile a New York law firm hired to chase the money Jean-Claude Duvalier had taken abroad, put at somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred million dollars, ran into French courts that refused American jurisdiction and Swiss banks that cited their tradition of discretion. In France the exile was spending ten thousand dollars a month on telephone calls.

Tens of thousands of Haitians reached Palm Beach County by boat between 1979 and 1981. Almost all of them arrived as Catholics and found no Catholic church that could receive them in their own language. The church in Miami, dominated by Irish Americans, was slow to notice them. The first Haitian priest settled in the area in 1987, a Scalabrinian raised and trained in Haiti who moved down from New York and founded Notre Dame in Delray Beach. A second Haitian church followed in the 1990s at Fort Pierce. The evangelical congregations had meanwhile answered quickly, repatriating parts of North American missions with Haitian pastors at their head. Many Catholics who wanted to worship in Creole went to Protestant services, some staying Catholic and some converting. By 2001 the priest at Delray Beach, serving about seventeen thousand Haitians, the densest concentration in the county, reckoned Protestants slightly outnumbered Catholics.

Haitians were to elect a president on 29 November 1987 under the constitution they had approved in March, and it was to be the first vote in thirty years that the army did not control. Gangs loyal to the old regime spent the night before shooting people and knocking the radio stations off the air with grenades. In the morning voters queued at a school on Avenue John Brown, five blocks from the palace. An army convoy stopped, its officers spoke with the armed men waiting nearby, and drove on. The gunmen went into the school and killed everyone they found, finishing with machetes. About twenty bodies were left. Similar attacks ran across the capital. By midday the military council had cancelled the election and dissolved the electoral council that had organised it, explaining that this would allow Haiti to have a president freely chosen by the people. The United States suspended all aid. Nothing moved in Port-au-Prince for days.

Competitive elections have become common across Africa since 1990. In Benin the Marxist ruler Kerekou accepted defeat at the polls in 1991 and won office back legitimately in 1996. A popular rising in Mali ended military dictatorship, and the elections held since have survived deep poverty. Botswana has held contested votes and watched incumbents retire since 1966. Ghana transferred power peacefully on a razor thin result in 2008, on the eve of an oil boom. Richard Reid treats a tally of elections as a poor measure of democratic depth. Nigerian votes are still bought by those with cash. The loser of the 2010 Ivorian election simply refused to leave. Kenya's 2007 result produced killings and an internationally brokered power sharing deal. In Ethiopia the ruling front suppressed the opposition after the disputed 2005 vote and took ninety nine percent of parliamentary seats in 2010. Museveni in Uganda, Kagame in Rwanda and Isaias in Eritrea all came out of liberation armies, and all of them treat political control as something they earned by fighting.