2010-11-29 12:35:36 Xinhua Web Editor: Zhang Jin
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Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) said on Sunday night that irregularities in elections during the day were small and not enough to cancel the results.

Pierre-Louis Opont, CEP’s director general, said that among the 1,500 electoral centers, only 56 had to be closed during the elections on Sunday.

He also said that the call for nullifying the election results by most of the presidential candidates was not an official demand. To the moment, they have not made any formal request to the CEP, he said.

According to Opont, canceling 56 centers out of 1,500 is not enough to cancel the elections, whose second leg will be held on Jan. 16, 2011.

“We are going to analyze what happened in those 56 centers and between 48 and 72 hours we are going to give a new report, telling the reasons for canceling those centers,” Opont said.

He also said that during the electoral process two people died and 10,000 votes were lost.

Haiti held on Sunday presidential and legislative elections. About 4.7 million Haitians were summoned to vote in a new president, 99 deputies and 11 senators.

The elections were closed in the afternoon amid denouncements of electoral irregularities.

On Sunday noon, a majority of the presidential candidates, including leading candidate Mirlande Manignat, demanded to cancel the elections due to the alleged irregularities.

Responding to the call by 12 opposition presidential candidates,thousands of Haitians took to the streets to protest what they consider an electoral fraud.

The main demonstrations were in Petionville, Delmas in the capital Port-au-Prince, and in Carrefour, a neighboring municipality which has become part of the capital conurbation. Carrefour was one of the areas worst hit by the nation’s Jan. 12 earthquake.