The earthquake that destroyed so much of Haiti last January sent fissures down the side of the nondescript building that now houses the electoral council in Port-au-Prince. But the office still managed to function as the site where, by August 5th, thirty-four people had registered to run for President in the upcoming November election. Twelve days later, crowds gathered in front of the building, in the rain, to learn which of those contenders the council would officially approve for the ballot. But the council did not release the final list for three more days, at midnight. The council’s members, it seemed, feared the reaction their decision might provoke.

Wyclef Jean, the hip-hop star, was one of those who had registered as a candidate, and he was the focus of much of the fuss. In the days before the council’s decision, he claimed in e-mails that he had been the subject of death threats, and said that he was in hiding somewhere in Haiti. Jean often makes calls from undisclosed locations, and it turned out that in this case he was at his family’s house in Lasserre, just outside Port-au-Prince. He’d been in and out of Haiti a lot in the preceding days: in to register as a candidate, then out to celebrate his wedding anniversary (at an undisclosed location), on to Belgium for a concert, then back to Port-au-Prince for a day or two, and then out again_,_ to Manhattan, for an interview with Rolling Stone. The day before the electoral council was to announce the final list of candidates, scandalous reports emerged about financial improprieties in Jean’s charity. In Port-au-Prince again, under siege, Jean, who had portrayed himself as a generous émigré bringing the light of his compassion and worldly knowledge to Haiti, was implying that the race had gone very dark.

This election, to be held ten months after the earthquake, will be a critical one, and has been receiving an unprecedented amount of international attention. But it was beginning to sound like many of the Haitian elections I’d witnessed in the years I’d been writing about Haiti: too many candidates, most of them profoundly insignificant; too many one-man political parties, or groupuscules, as they are called; death threats; a candidate in hiding; some complicated conspiracy theories. These are all ingredients of the everyday political macédoine. To Haitians, political death threats are a joke. Politicians want to be on a death list; it means that you are serious. Jean, who has lived thirty-one of his forty years in New York and New Jersey, had proved himself a quick study in old-fashioned posturing and heroics.

The outgoing President, René Garcia Préval, knows how to handle political powder kegs like Jean’s candidacy. He called Jean out from “hiding” into the Presidential offices behind the ruins of the National Palace, for a chat. Préval likes to talk, so it didn’t mean much when Jean boasted that the meeting lasted for two hours. After asking Jean about the death threats, Préval offered to increase his security (which Préval’s government had just downgraded). He then put Jean on the phone with Jude Célestin, who had been chosen as the candidate of Préval’s party, Inite (“Unity”), after a lot of behind-the-scenes squabbling. He shook Jean’s hand for the camera, and Jean posted the pictures to Twitter, writing, “Very positive. Smiles all the way.” A seasoned Haitian politician would have been concerned by these Presidential gestures.

In the end, the electoral council ruled that Nel Ust Wyclef Jean, born in Croix-des-Bouquets and a current resident of Saddle River, New Jersey, could not be on the ballot, because he had not lived in Haiti for the previous five consecutive years, as is constitutionally required. Fourteen other contenders were also rejected. Jean, at first the obedient statesman, accepted the ruling with a Tweet about continuing his work with Haiti’s youth. Thirty-six hours later, he had reconsidered, and he Tweeted that “our Lawyers are appealing the decision. We have met all the Requirements. . . . And the law must be respected.” There is no legal precedent for any such appeal. After the electoral council announced that the ruling was final, Jean released a new song, which described Préval as Lucifer and went on, “I voted for you for President in 2006, why do you reject my candidacy today?”

The remaining nineteen candidates are seeking the Presidency of a country even more devastated than the one Préval took over when he was elected. Haiti was already the poorest country in the hemisphere, with rampant illiteracy, high infant mortality, low life expectancy. Now countless ghosts hover over Port-au-Prince and the rest of the western province. A conversation with a shop owner stops at the phrase “my daughter”; when he turns away and looks down at his merchandise, everyone knows what has been lost. Micha Gaillard, a politician and professor, died in the wreckage of the beautiful old Ministry of Justice, near the National Palace, also in ruins. (Thirty per cent of Haiti’s public servants died in the earthquake.) According to friends, Gaillard was trapped under the rubble for more than three days, using his cell phone, until finally he told his family to go away and leave him.

Ten-year-old Tine, short for Albertine, lives with her grandmother Martinique Lemaire in a tent in a refugee camp next to the airport. She’s jumping rope, and her braids flap. The earthquake knocked her family’s house down on her mother and father. “Goudou-goudou kraze kay-la sou yo,” she says. Goudou-goudou, an onomatopoetic rendering of the sound that people heard when the shaking began, is the Haitian Creole name for this earthquake. Wilgens Mehony, who is fourteen but looks about eight, works as an unpaid servant in his aunt’s improvised shack in Solino, a hilly quartier populaire in Port-au-Prince. Wilgens fetches water in the morning, and at night he tidies the closet-sized shack. He takes his three cousins to school and picks them up; he has never been allowed to attend himself. His little brother, who was his only real friend, died in the aunt’s former house, when goudou-goudou shook it to the ground.

Most of the bodies are gone now, decomposed beneath the rubble, or crushed in the initial shock, or hauled out by dump truck to a mass burial ground outside town, near the sea, or, occasionally, pulled from the wreckage by the family and given proper burial rites. Yet the smell of rot can still be fierce and nauseating. The catastrophe is believed to have taken as many as two hundred and thirty thousand lives.

A million people are homeless or semi-homeless, most of them in this city, which seems more populous than ever. Another 1.2 million are living in slapdash housing that families have erected on the sidewalks in front of their former homes or in temporary camps. Most of the three-quarters of a million people who fled the capital seeking food and shelter have returned, according to information from Digicel, the country’s largest cell-phone company, which watches the demographic movements of its users. The returnees often come back with other family members from the countryside. The Port-au-Prince area now represents twenty-three per cent of the country’s total population, or 2.3 million people. If drastic measures are not taken, by 2015 the city’s population could double.

The reasons for the return are complicated. First of all, the Republic of Port-au-Prince, as it has long been called, is traditionally one of the only places where a Haitian might find a job. Life in dusty provincial towns and on the tiny subsistence farms in the countryside is bleak, and teen-agers often grow restless and desperate there. The only city that promises contact with the modern world is Port-au-Prince.

Now add the foreign-aid earthquake extravaganza. In normal times, some three thousand nongovernmental organizations are functioning in Haiti, most of them based in the capital, and hundreds more have arrived since the quake. Port-au-Prince is the center for almost all the money that the earthquake has brought in: hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aid, which means tents and clothes and prenatal kits and health care and jobs. The city has communications and financial institutions, and the international airport. It’s where the media come to broadcast donors’ activities; the backdrop of the ruins is a powerful fund-raising tool.

So far, the one visible thing that the decimated Préval government has accomplished since the earthquake is to categorize the damage. The Ministry of Public Works, Transportation, and Communications, remarkably, has examined almost every house and place of business in the city, and stamped the front wall with a green, yellow, or red stencil with the initials of the ministry: “MTPTC.” If your stencil is green, you can continue to live or work in the building. If it’s yellow, you may enter, but the building is not intact. Red means that a building poses an immediate danger. Red stencils predominate.

The inaction everywhere else in the government is apparent. On a recent visit to the huge air-conditioned tent occupied by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, I saw five employees working, although there were desks and computers for about eighty. One of the five was a security guard. The commission, chaired by former President Bill Clinton and the current Haitian Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, has held only two meetings.

Officials in the government and on the interim commission all talk about long-term decentralization that would move some of the population out of the capital, and about a federalized Haiti that would empower the provincial governments. No more Republic of Port-au-Prince, they say. The interim commission proposed $1.6 billion for recovery projects the week before last, at its second board meeting, and included agricultural spending. That money is among the spoils that the earthquake is bringing into Haiti, and it will be up to the next President to protect them and distribute them properly. But everything is on hold until the elections.

Charles (Samuel) Pierre is not feeling well. His house collapsed in the earthquake, and now he’s living in a refugee camp called Touissant, in front of the wreckage of the National Palace, a formerly glorious white confection that has been sinking farther into its broken walls and foundations ever since the quake, when its three domes were pitched this way and that. Samuel, who is twenty-six, has a fever that he has diagnosed as malaria. From time to time, he breaks out in a sweat. He’s wearing a sports tank top and jeans slung low on his hips, and he’s standing around with a bunch of friends. None of them have any work, not even in what is known as “the informal sector,” the frenzy of street-level capitalism that Haitians engage in to make a little change.

A statue of Haiti’s founding revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, presides over the blue tarp roofs and the corrugated-tin-and-cardboard walls of his descendants’ houses, their tiny grocery stores, their two-pot restaurants and one-chair barbershops, their jury-rigged cell-phone-charging boutiques. Children take bucket baths at the martyr’s feet. Toussaint, a slave and former stable boy, organized his countrymen and led the world’s only successful slave revolt. He died in 1803, in a prison in the Jura Mountains, in France, a year before his revolution brought Haiti independence.

Samuel wants a new hero—someone like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first freely and fairly elected President of Haiti. Aristide, who entered office in 1991, was outspoken, fiery, a friend (so Samuel believes) of the people. If Aristide were here today, Samuel says, he would be President again. (Aristide was elected President twice and overthrown twice, the second time in 2004. He now lives as an exile in South Africa.) Samuel looks down on Préval, who is a President without a palace. Samuel cannot understand why Wyclef Jean would even want the job without the real estate. He wasn’t for Jean, because, he said, Jean never did anything for Creole street rap. Samuel is a Creole rapper. Many Haitians, even his supporters, consider Jean an outsider.

Samuel leads a group of friends through a nearby camp to a patch of dirt and cement outside a tent to listen to music. Someone hands him a pinch of weed. Samuel lost five family members in the earthquake. “You can’t be not sad,” he says. “We’re sleeping like animals in the mud, one on top of the other. We never even hear Préval’s voice. He doesn’t tell us anything.” Since the earthquake, the President has barely spoken to the Haitian people. “La situation le dépasse,” one of his former ministers says. “It’s beyond him.”

Samuel won’t vote in the November election. “Why would I?” he asks. “It’s all blòf. We don’t see any politician we like. We don’t even know if there will be elections. We want support, we want to work. I would work every day if I could.”

Yet there is one candidate who, though his name hasn’t been recognized in the international media, interests Samuel. That’s forty-nine-year-old Michel (Sweet Micky) Martelly, another musician, and a friend of President Préval’s. Like Jean, Martelly has lived in the U.S. for years at a time, but he has been living in Haiti for at least the past three years; he is perceived there as more of a Haitian, and, unlike Jean, he speaks Creole like a Haitian. Sweet Micky sings konpa, the Afro-Caribbean popular music that has long been the favored style of Haitian musicians. Jean himself has always acknowledged Sweet Micky’s popularity in Haiti, and Sweet Micky is featured on one of his disks, “The Carnival”: you hear Jean’s voice saying, as he introduces a song, “Surprise! It’s Sweet Micky, y’all.”

At the end of our conversation, Samuel tells me, “Everything is calm now. Jwèt poko kòmanse”—“The game hasn’t yet begun.” He means that the candidates haven’t started making the traditional payments to their factions in the shantytowns (and now the camps, too, in all likelihood), to stir up trouble and influence the vote. People look forward to this injection of funds.

Wyclef Jean’s candidacy, though flawed, filled a void in Haitian politics. Sweet Micky is the only remaining candidate who can potentially even approximate his appeal. The others offer little to attract younger voters (people under twenty-four represent sixty per cent of Haiti’s population), or those who are simply sick of politics. A quick look at the remaining plausible candidates shows why. The wife of Leslie Manigat, a lifelong Presidential candidate who actually served as President for four and a half months, is one of the best-known contenders. Another is a former government minister, a Cornell-educated urban planner who is directing the national reconstruction projects, and has been politically active for decades. A former senator who was Aristide’s final Prime Minister and spent two years in prison, without trial, after Aristide was overthrown in 2004, is well known. Another, Jude Célestin, is the director and founder of the government’s construction agency, which has become more visible since the earthquake. As the candidate of Préval’s party, Célestin has a political infrastructure behind him. His Web site, though, is still under construction.