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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - (KRT) - As 32 presidential candidates square off in a nation racked by a rebellion last year, Haitian and foreign officials conceded Monday they will likely need to postpone the Nov. 20 election because preparations are in disarray.

The Provisional Electoral Council is yet to hire hundreds of regional election supervisors, identify polling locations or begin recruiting up to 40,000 needed poll workers. And the ballots cannot be printed until the Haitian Supreme Court resolves disputes over who can and cannot run for president.

In closed-door meetings last month, the council barred at least two heavyweight candidates, prompting recriminations from their supporters and highlighting how contentious the race for power here has become.

And Friday, the council created even more furor, indicating it was going to reject dozens - if not hundreds - of candidates for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies.

Haitian and foreign officials contacted Monday agreed that, with all these problems and controversies, it is unlikely the election will take place on time. "There is no way this is going to happen on November 20," said Council member Patrick Fequiere.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stressed during a visit to Haiti last week that elections must be "open, inclusive and fair" to restore democracy and order after the rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year. And she urged the electoral council to work more closely with U.N. advisers to ensure that the balloting puts a new government in the National Palace by a constitutional deadline of Feb. 7.

In all, 54 candidates turned in applications to run for president. The council rejected 22 of them - mostly independent candidates who did not gather the 40,000 signatures required but also a key figure in Aristide's Lavalas Family party and a Haitian-American tycoon.

Dumarsais Simeus - who runs a $100 million dollar food empire in Texas - accused the council of seeking "to control the outcome of the next presidential election by barring candidates." He is appealing his disqualification to the Supreme Court.

Simeus was rejected because the Constitution does not allow Haitians who obtain other citizenships to run for public office. Officials involved in election preparations said he wrote that he was a U.S. citizen on his landing card when he last arrived at the airport here.

Critics say this type of scrutiny is capriciously applied; the council certified at least one other known U.S. citizen, Miami Lakes, Fla., businessman Samir Mourra.

A council spokesman could not be reached for comment.

"Simeus was seen as a heavy contender," said Fequiere, the council member, who for months has complained that it lacks transparency and objectivity.

He said electoral observers are just beginning to vet the process.

On Sept. 19, a group funded by the Canadian government, The International Mission for Evaluating Elections in Haiti, requested any documents showing how parties and candidates were disqualified, as well how key jobs in the election apparatus were awarded.

Last Wednesday, the group sent a letter to the council president saying that it was yet to receive the documents.

"We were assured that we would receive some basic administrative and technical documents that we have since then been waiting for with the impatience you can imagine," wrote the group's director, Anne Fuller.

Few people are willing to hazard a prediction on how this election will play out - whether it will produce a government with any true authority, even whether it will take place this year.

And the political future is just as sketchy.

While parties are making all sorts of alliances and jockeying for constituencies, no big ideological themes are emerging.

The list of 32 presidential contenders is a panoply of the old and new, familiar and unknown. If none gets a majority on the first round, the two top contenders will face a run-off.

Lavalas - which has been the main voice of Haiti's poor majority for 15 years - is split between those who want to participate in the election and those who want to boycott it on the grounds that Aristide was illegally pushed out.

And the council rejected two of their key figures as presidential candidates. Former Sen. Gerald Gilles registered at the last minute, but was rejected reportedly because other party leaders did not endorse his candidacy. And supporters of Gerard Jean-Juste - a firebrand priest and voice of the more strident wing of the party - were told they could not submit his papers because he was in jail.

The goverment charges, among other crimes, that Jean-Juste was involved in the murder of a journalist, but Amnesty Interantional calls the former Miami resident a political prisoner. He has denied all charges.