Haiti's Youth, that Make Up Half the Country, May Not Reach the Polls

On August 30, 2026, Haitians are scheduled to head to the polls for the first time in nearly a decade, choosing a president, a full legislature, and local officials. Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has called this vote essential to restoring democratic legitimacy. It would be the first election since Jovenel Moïse won in 2016, and also the first election since his assassination in 2021, which left Haiti without any elected president at all. It is also being organized with a backdrop of a country where armed gangs control an estimated 90% of the capital and more than 1.4 million people are internally displaced. The CEP itself has admitted that, with such instability, the infrastructure for secure polling that is needed to hold the vote safely do not yet exist in all parts of the country. For Haiti's youth, who make up roughly half the population, this election will test whether or not democracy can return to their country. This may begin with the question of whether the election can reach the generation that is so heavily controlled by and recruited into gangs.

A Youth Majority Living Inside the Crisis

Haiti's population is especially young: nearly half of its roughly 12 million people are under 18, and just over half are under 25. In most countries, a youth population of that size would be understood as the decisive electorate for any given vote. In Haiti, however, young people are the most targeted population for the many armed groups nationwide. UNICEF has reported that child recruitment into gangs rose exponentially in the last two years, and estimates that children now make up somewhere between 30% and 50% of all gang members nationwide. Young boys are often used as lookouts and informants because they draw less suspicion than older people, while young girls are often forced into domestic labor and exploited. Aid workers and researchers point to the same factors driving youth involvement in gangs: hunger, limited access to schooling, internal displacement, and an unstable state that has been unable to control areas overrun with gang activity. Armed groups can offer money, protection, and a warped sense of community to young Haitians. These drivers may make the ballot box a difficult initiative for the government to push.

The Internal Displacement Crisis as a Major Obstacle

The gang activity in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, has proven to be a major obstacle to the election. The CEP opened voter registration in late July, but only in nine of Haiti's ten departments, with the West Department, where the capital and the largest share of the population is located, was excluded outright due to safety concerns. That is not a minor carve-out. Haitian law also requires voters to cast ballots where they are registered voters, and more than 1.4 million people, many of them young, have already been displaced from that capital region. Consequently, many of them are living in camps or forced to stay with relatives far from the districts where they are registered. As such, election officials have proposed the idea of allowing Haitians abroad to vote for the Haitian president for the first time, potentially including the major diaspora abroad including over a million Haitians of voting age in the United States alone, many of them young. Having said that, though, no comparable fix has been offered for the young people who never left the country, are internally displaced, and simply can no longer reach a polling place in their own neighborhoods.

Whether the Vote Can Persist Despite Violence

Haiti's current transitional leadership is similarly unconfident in the ability for the election to occur smoothly by August 30. Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé has publicly questioned whether the security situation will allow for the vote at all, and the CEP has announced that restoring order in gang-held territory is a precondition for holding the first round. More than 5,900 people were killed by gang violence in the past year alone, with hundreds more Haitian deaths and disappearances likely undocumented. Thus, while over 300 political parties have registered to compete for representation over the youth electorate, no party is able to reach that population.

Haiti's youth are not, in this sense, disengaged in the way abstention numbers often otherwise suggest of a young electorate. They are simply the group most likely to be either recruited by the groups trying to seize the state and government, or displaced by the activity of the groups themselves. If the August 30 election happens on schedule, the future of democracy may only be a factor of whether or not young Haitians can or will participate at all.