1961, April 8 – May 9: (The Re-Election of 1,320,748 to 0: The Ballots Pre-Printed with Duvalier’s Name, Foreign Priests Marched to the Polls, and My Enemies…

1961, April 8 – May 9: (The Re-Election of 1,320,748 to 0: The Ballots Pre-Printed with Duvalier’s Name, Foreign Priests Marched to the Polls, and My Enemies Can Reproach Me Only with Loving My People Too Much): On April 8, 1961, Duvalier dissolved the two Chambers and decreed elections for a new unicameral fifty-seven-man National Assembly on April 30. The ballots, forthwith printed up, were headed: République d’Haïti, Dr. François Duvalier, Président de la République — below, in appropriate position, were listed the names of legislative candidates. On election day the turnout was mixed: at the Cap, the préfet required all government employees and prisoners in the jail to vote, then swept up Canadian, American, and other foreign residents, French priests, missionaries and their wives, and marched them all to the polls under guard. Out of an estimated one million eligible Haitians, 1,320,748 according to the government exercised the franchise, sweeping in the all-Duvalier slate. More to the point, in a stratagem surely without precedent in the history of electoral politics, on May 9 voters and the world were told that Haiti had not only elected a new legislature but, by a vote of 1,320,748 to 0, had re-elected François Duvalier, unopposed, for a second six-year term commencing May 22, 1961 — this despite his own 1957 constitution specifying that his term shall end on May 15, 1963. Duvalier bowed his head and softly replied that his enemies could reproach him only with one crime — of loving his people too much, and as a revolutionary he had no right to disregard the voice of the people. Not for nothing had Duvalier seen Vincent, Lescot, Estimé, and Magloire, his four predecessors, each overthrown as a result of last-minute attempts to prolong waning presidencies — with characteristic astuteness he therefore re-elected himself while two years remained to run. Haitian democracy, he replied to the outraged New York Times, is neither the English nor the French version and still less the American democracy — he was of course perfectly correct.