http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1973228,00.html

The gold-trimmed let­ters mark­ing Haiti’s Leg­isla­tive Palace still shine brightly on the front wall of the sea­side build­ing in Port-au-Prince. But the mas­sive earth­quake that hit the nation on Jan. 12, killing more than 200,000 peo­ple, left a hole on one side of the struc­ture, expos­ing a black wrought-iron stair­case. The quake ripped open the building’s oppo­site side, where detri­tus like metal, con­crete, chairs, desks and paper scraps spewed forth like vol­canic lava.

Haiti’s par­lia­men­tar­i­ans now oper­ate out of a trailer on the grounds of the old police acad­emy — and their ranks are as much in dis­ar­ray as the palace they used to use. Of the 30 Sen­a­tors (three from each of the country’s 10 depart­ments, or regions), two died in the tem­blor; one seat was already unfilled before the quake; and 10 mem­bers fin­ished their terms last Novem­ber. But the coun­try wasn’t pre­pared to hold a vote even then, and so their tenures were extended to May — after which only about half the cham­ber will be occu­pied. (See pic­tures from the after­math of Haiti’s earthquake.)

That’s just the begin­ning of the math­e­mat­i­cal chaos that’s fallen on Haiti’s polit­i­cal sys­tem like a shower of earth­quake debris. Elec­tions for Pres­i­dent, Sen­a­tors, deputies and myr­iad regional posts were all sup­posed to take place this year. But as the gov­ern­ment crawls out from one of the worst nat­ural dis­as­ters of mod­ern times, the chal­lenge of hold­ing those con­tests looks daunt­ing at best, espe­cially since Haiti is the west­ern hemisphere’s poor­est coun­try. But Hait­ian Pres­i­dent René Pré­val and U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton last week urged that leg­isla­tive elec­tions, which were sup­posed to have taken place in Feb­ru­ary and March, and the pres­i­den­tial bal­lot­ing, which has yet to be sched­uled, be held. Oth­er­wise, they warn, the nation, which has a long, vio­lent his­tory of polit­i­cal tur­moil and dic­ta­tor­ships, risks under­min­ing its fledg­ling democracy.

In a brief inter­view with TIME this week in Port-au-Prince, Pré­val, whose pres­i­dency will end next Feb­ru­ary, because he is not eli­gi­ble to run for another five-year term, insisted that “elec­tions are a neces­sity” — an essen­tial con­di­tion for Haiti’s post-quake recov­ery as well as long-term devel­op­ment. “Elec­tions may not hap­pen tomor­row, but they will hap­pen before I leave,” he said. “We have 11 months. We have to start to plan as quickly as pos­si­ble.” (See a pic­to­r­ial his­tory of Haiti’s misery.)

If only it were that easy. In the country’s most pop­u­lous depart­ment, which includes Port-au-Prince, almost half the vot­ing booths were destroyed or lost in the quake — which also killed the head of the U.N. team that over­sees the logis­ti­cal, tech­ni­cal and secu­rity facets of Haiti’s elec­tions. A new U.N. team arrived this week and still has to be trained. What’s more, ruined voter-registration rolls, which are on backup com­puter files some­where in Mex­ico, have to be retrieved. And that doesn’t include clean­ing up the list before the elec­tions, dis­trib­ut­ing new voter cards and iden­ti­fy­ing where vot­ers relo­cated after the dis­as­ter, which dis­placed some 1.3 mil­lion of Haiti’s 9 mil­lion people.

Still, says Gail­lot Dorsinvil, pres­i­dent of the Pro­vi­sional Elec­toral Coun­cil, “it’s not a ques­tion of if we are going to hold elec­tions, but how. The debate is whether or not we hold one elec­tion for all the posi­tions that need to be filled, or hold two elec­tions — one for the pres­i­dency and another for every­thing else.”

But many Haitians are skep­ti­cal that a gov­ern­ment that has seemed inca­pable of address­ing basic needs like secu­rity, shel­ter and san­i­ta­tion can put together even one national elec­tion, let alone two. The same com­plaints echo off the rub­ble piles from the capital’s bidonvilles to its more afflu­ent sub­urbs: lack of response, of lead­er­ship, of a plan. “If I look around, it’s like we don’t have a gov­ern­ment,” says Sineus Edner, 56, a Port-au-Prince secu­rity guard. “For me, I’d rather vote for [U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack] Obama. We heard from him [after the quake] before we heard from our own President.”

Some Haitians say they were jaded on elec­tions in the best of times — and cer­tainly aren’t in the mood to go through the exer­cise dur­ing a period of cat­a­stro­phe. “Elec­tions have done noth­ing for me,” says Jean Bernard Thomas, 45, who has been vot­ing since Haiti’s first demo­c­ra­tic elec­tion, in 1990. “There has to be devel­op­ment along with elec­tions. My kids still can’t go to school, and I can’t keep them fed. Why bother to vote again?”

If elec­tions aren’t or can’t be held this year, par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are con­sid­er­ing other options to fill the gov­ern­men­tal vac­uum. One, says Sen­a­tor Jeanty Jean Williams of the south­ern Nippes depart­ment, is that the cur­rent leg­is­la­ture cre­ate a “regional state coun­cil,” with 30 mem­bers cho­sen from des­ig­nated civic groups around the coun­try. That body’s job in turn would be to help put together a “national state coun­cil” to act as a sort of interim par­lia­ment until for­mal leg­isla­tive elec­tions can take place, per­haps next year. “That is the most pop­u­lar alter­na­tive,” says Williams, “because of its [regional] inclu­sive­ness” in the process of not only choos­ing Haiti’s lead­ers but direct­ing quake recov­ery. “It involves a broad rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Hait­ian soci­ety inter­fac­ing with the inter­na­tional and human­i­tar­ian aid organizations.”

That still doesn’t solve the issue of who will replace Pré­val, who insists that he won’t serve beyond next Feb­ru­ary. And some Haiti watch­ers worry that the “inter­fac­ing” Williams men­tions is just another way of say­ing inter­na­tional NGOs would keep run­ning things in the coun­try, as they were essen­tially doing even before the earth­quake. That model has “gone nowhere,” says Robert Maguire, a Haiti expert affil­i­ated with Trin­ity Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity and the U.S. Insti­tute of Peace in Wash­ing­ton. Despite the post-quake chaos, “it’s time for [Haiti] to become a state that serves its peo­ple and moves [away] from the NGO. Elec­tions are impor­tant because they are an invest­ment in Haiti’s long-term future.”

Elec­tions are indeed a crit­i­cal con­di­tion for Haiti’s future. The ques­tion is whether con­di­tions on the ground in Haiti’s night­mar­ish present can real­is­ti­cally accom­mo­date them.