Digital interference: The silent threat to Haiti’s first election in a decade | Analysis

BOSTON —- Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has set Dec. 13, 2026, as the date for the first round of presidential and legislative elections, with a runoff and local elections scheduled for Feb. 21, 2027. The vote would be the country’s first national election in a decade. Still, it is approaching amid a security crisis, political instability, mass displacement and deep public distrust of institutions. 

Much of the attention has focused on the most visible threats: whether voters can safely reach polling stations, whether displaced people will be able to participate, and whether illicit money will influence candidates and campaigns.

Those concerns are critical. But another threat could undermine the election without a single polling station being attacked: digital interference.

Disinformation, manipulated videos, coordinated social media campaigns, and attacks or false claims involving electoral technology could influence how Haitians understand the campaign, suppress turnout, and, perhaps most damagingly, convince voters that an election was stolen even when ballots were counted accurately.

For Haiti, the stakes are particularly high this election cycle. The election system can be physically secure and technically accurate yet still fail if voters do not trust the information surrounding it or the result it produces.

An election under extraordinary pressure 

Haiti enters the electoral period with large parts of the country affected by armed gangs’ violence. The United Nations has estimated that gangs control between 85% and 90% of Port-au-Prince. 

The security crisis has displaced more than 1.4 million people and made movement difficult in many communities. Political and economic instability have further weakened public confidence in government institutions.

Rosy Auguste Ducéna, program manager for the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH), has argued that territorial control itself can affect an election because the departments most affected by armed groups represent a significant share of Haiti’s electorate.

 “If they control the West, Artibonite, and Centre departments, they pretty much control the elections,” said Auguste Ducéna, highlighting that these regions make up about 60 percent of the electorate. 

But physical control is only part of the problem.

While a gang roadblock can prevent someone from reaching a polling station, digital interference can influence whether that person believes voting is worthwhile in the first place.

A false message claiming that a polling station has been moved, that violence has erupted nearby or that voting has been canceled could suppress participation without anyone physically blocking a road.

Likewise, a fabricated results announcement circulated immediately after voting could create confusion before election officials have time to respond.

The threat, therefore, is not simply whether someone can manipulate votes. It is whether someone can manipulate what voters believe about the election.

Haiti’s information environment is vulnerable

Haiti’s digital footprint may appear relatively small, but that does not make the country immune to online manipulation.

According to a Data Portal report, about 39% of the population — roughly 4.7 million people — was estimated to be online in 2026. 

Facebook accounts for a large share of social media activity, accounting for close to 7 in 10 social media visits in the country, while mobile devices are the primary way many Haitians access the internet. That creates an environment in which a small number of platforms can have an outsized influence on the information people receive.

The problem is not simply that false information exists. It is that false information can travel faster than institutions can verify and correct it.

Researchers monitoring WhatsApp and Telegram groups found that misleading videos portraying Haitian gangs as engaging in “cannibalism” circulated through hundreds of public groups in 2024 and reached millions of people, even after the material had been debunked. 

Haitian armed groups have also demonstrated their ability to use social media. Gang leaders have used livestreams, TikTok, WhatsApp and other platforms to issue threats, provide gifts to influencers, and shape narratives.

The infrastructure for digital influence already exists. An election simply gives it a new target.

The danger is bigger than fake videos

Digital interference does not necessarily require hacking an election system.

A fabricated video showing a candidate making a controversial statement could spread during the final days of the campaign. A network of fake accounts could amplify allegations of fraud. A manipulated image could falsely suggest that election officials favor one candidate.

And a false claim that election results have been manipulated may be just as damaging as an actual cyberattack.

That distinction matters because elections depend not only on the accuracy of the count but also on public acceptance of the result.

A 2026 academic study by researcher Ansar Suherman and scholar colleagues on disinformation in developing democracies found that manipulated information can provide losing candidates and their supporters with narratives they can use to reject election results, regardless of whether the vote itself was actually compromised.

“Disinformation not only fuels suspicion but can also incite organized resistance against perceived fraud, irrespective of empirical evidence,” the authors wrote.

 “In numerous cases, losing actors deploy claims of stolen elections as post-fact rationalization for defeat, fostering civil unrest and obstructing peaceful democratic transitions,” they added.

In Haiti, where trust in electoral institutions is already weak—and elections often end in turmoil and contestations— such claims could gain traction quickly.

A 2024 Internews assessment found that 93% of Haitians surveyed did not trust the electoral system, while fewer than 2% expressed confidence in how elections were conducted. 

That level of distrust creates fertile ground for manipulation. 

Haiti has already been used as disinformation material

Haiti does not have to hold an election to become a target of election-related influence operations.

During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, intelligence agencies attributed a fabricated video claiming that Haitian migrants were illegally voting in Georgia to Russian influence operators. The video featured actors pretending to be Haitian migrants and was widely circulated before Georgia election officials publicly debunked it.

The episode demonstrated something important for Haiti: actors attempting to influence political perceptions do not necessarily need access to a country’s electoral infrastructure. They can manufacture a narrative from outside the country and distribute it through platforms used by millions of people.

Foreign governments are not the only potential actors.

A 2023 investigation by The Guardian reported on “Team Jorge,” a private operation that claimed to manipulate 33 presidential elections worldwide—with 27 attempts being successful—using networks of fake accounts and hacked communications.

The broader lesson is that election interference has become increasingly accessible to private actors with money, technical expertise and a political objective.

In Haiti, possible beneficiaries could include political candidates, economic interests, armed groups or foreign actors seeking to influence the country’s political direction.

Weaknesses in electoral system can amplify falsehood; Haiti is not alone

Digital interference becomes more dangerous when it exploits real weaknesses.

Haiti’s voter-registration and identification systems have faced longstanding concerns over outdated information and gaps in coordination among government institutions.

Electoral experts have raised questions about duplicate records and the absence of comprehensive independent audits of voter data. Former CEP Director General Max Délices has also warned about “zombie voters” — people who remain on voter rolls after their deaths because Haiti lacks an effective system linking civil records, death records and electoral databases.

These weaknesses do not prove that an election is fraudulent.

But they provide material for someone seeking to make voters believe that it is.

A bad-faith actor does not have to invent a problem from nothing. It can take an existing weakness, exaggerate it and present it as evidence of widespread fraud.

That distinction is crucial.

The objective of digital interference may not be to convince everyone of one particular story. It may be enough to make people uncertain about every story.

Other democracies have experienced similar challenges.

During Kenya’s 2017 and 2022 elections, disputes included allegations that election results-transmission systems had been compromised. 

Romania’s 2024 presidential election was annulled after authorities identified evidence of coordinated manipulation and foreign interference, including the use of artificial intelligence. Ecuador’s 2025 election also saw AI-generated material designed to imitate legitimate news organizations and influence political narratives.

Generative AI has lowered the cost of producing convincing fake audio, video and images. Still, while the technology does not create the underlying vulnerability, it makes exploitation easier and faster.

For a country with limited institutional resources and widespread distrust in political institutions, that is a serious concern.

Haiti’s biometric national ID system has not undergone a full independent security audit since 2017. Electoral systems specialist Alex Jecrois has flagged inconsistencies in the underlying citizen data. Max Délices, a former director general of the CEP, has also warned that names can remain on voter rolls without documentation confirming a voter’s death because there is no functioning link among civil registries, cemetery records and the national identification office.

That gap, which contributed to the cancellation of the 2016 presidential election, remains unresolved nearly a decade later. It could give bad-faith actors an opening to amplify “zombie voter” claims or allege fraud after the vote.

As recently assessed by Internews, 64.4 percent of Haitians viewed the electoral process as broken, while only about 2 million of the roughly 6.5 million voters registered by the National Identification Office (ONI) had received the newer biometric ID card. In such an environment, even an unsubstantiated claim of electoral manipulation could be difficult for authorities to disprove quickly.

Now, what the CEP can still do to ensure election security 

Haiti cannot build an entirely new digital election-security system before December. But the CEP can take practical steps to reduce the risks.

• First, it should establish rapid-response channels with major technology platforms. 

With assistance from organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the CEP could develop mechanisms for quickly flagging demonstrably false election-related content on Meta’s platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, TikTok and other major platforms.

• Second, the electoral authorities should make the vote count independently verifiable. 

A transparent paper trail and publicly observable tallying process would make it harder for false claims about electronic manipulation to take hold.

• Third, Haiti should seek an independent review of voter-registration data before the final voter rolls are established. 

Identifying and addressing legitimate weaknesses in the rolls would reduce the ability of bad actors to exploit them after the vote.

• Fourth, the CEP should support an independent election-information network. 

Haitian news organizations, civil society groups and technology experts could work together to rapidly verify viral claims and distribute corrections through the same platforms where misinformation spreads.

The goal should not be for government officials to become the sole arbiters of truth. In a low-trust environment, corrections will be more credible when they come from independent institutions with established reputations.

In sum, the Dec. 13 election will rightly be judged by whether voters can safely reach polling stations and whether ballots are counted accurately.

But those measures alone will not determine whether Haiti’s first election in a decade succeeds.

A democratic election also depends on whether voters can make decisions based on reliable information and whether they trust the process enough to accept its outcome.

Digital interference can attack both.

A fabricated video does not need to change a single ballot. A bot network does not need to enter a polling station. A false claim that results were manipulated does not require an actual breach of an electoral server.

The damage can occur earlier — when voters begin to doubt what they see, what they hear and ultimately what they are being asked to believe.

Haiti has spent a decade trying to return to elections. Securing polling stations and protecting voters are essential. So is protecting the information environment in which those voters make their choices.

An election can be physically secure and still be democratically vulnerable if the public no longer knows what to believe.

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