Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Marie Therese Simplice awoke at dawn Tuesday and walked five hours through some of this city’s most dangerous neighborhoods to get the card needed to vote in Haiti’s elections next week.

But the desire to vote wasn’t what drove Simplice to get the card. She wanted something to acknowledge the 54 years she’s lived in this impoverished country of her birth.

“The election is important, but it’s this card I really need,” said Simplice, a widowed street vendor, as she stood in line with hundreds of others outside the country’s elections headquarters. “Everyone told me that if you’re going to do anything in life, you need this card.”

By Thursday, national elections officials said they had distributed 3.1 million of the 3.5 million biometric voter cards, the first national identity cards in the country’s history.

“If you include all the fraudulent documents, about 80 percent of Haitians have no reliable identity documents at all,” said Rosemond Pradel, a Haitian who moved from Pembroke Pines, Fla., three years ago to help run the Provisional Elections Council overseeing elections for president and parliament. “We had a situation in the past where people would go to a government office and get four, five, six identity documents under different names.”

Obstacles to registration

Like an ATM card, the laminated voter card can store reams of data about an individual, Pradel said. Each has the voter’s photograph and fingerprint to be inspected by poll workers on election day. Because many of Haiti’s parties worried about electronic manipulation of votes, the cards will not be read electronically.

Already postponed four times, Haiti’s first elections since the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years ago now look like they will be held Tuesday. Registration of voters and the distribution of the hi-tech cards have been chief reasons for delays.

Isolated in remote mountain villages or marooned in violent urban slums, many Haitians have proved difficult to identify and register as voters.

More than half of Haiti’s 8.3 million citizens have no record at all of their existence – no birth, medical, school or social insurance records.

Census data and land registries are unreliable, and tax rolls are flawed because of government corruption.

Over the past year, election workers registered voters by fanning out over the mountainous countryside. Often using mules to travel the poor roads, workers lugged photographic and fingerprinting equipment into remote villages. Since many rural Haitians had no identification, a local witness could vouch for their identities. And because an estimated 80 percent of the people are illiterate, personal marks were accepted as signatures, election workers said.

A Haitian woman carries her son across an open sewer trench, Saturday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Haitians will vote Tuesday in the first presidential and parliamentary elections since the ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

Once the registration photos and fingerprints were collected, the data was sent to a card manufacturer in Mexico. For the past few months election workers have been working to distribute cards to the 3.5 million registered voters. At least $60 million has been spent on the elections by the United States and other nations.

Voting problems remain

Unlike war-torn Iraq, Haiti has never had a permanent elections authority. With each new election, a different group has tinkered with, and often corrupted, voter rolls. The urban elites running the country for nearly two centuries found little reason to register voters or campaign in the countryside, where more than 4 million of Haiti’s poorest citizens live. The political and economic turmoil of the last two decades has displaced millions of Haitians throughout the country, demographers say.

Problems with the election process do not end with voter registration. On election day, many may have to walk as far as five miles to reach their polling places, partly because the 804 polls being set up is far fewer than in previous elections.

“We have a real concern with the quality of the voter lists – the names that will be at polling places on election day,” said Vincent de Herdt, a Haiti-based analyst with the International Foundation for Election Systems, an independent monitoring organization. “We don’t know the extent, but we fear that a lot of people are not going to be where their name is on the list. This is a very fluid, mobile population, and it’s difficult to record.”