The New York Times is finally get­ting around to a story that I’ve spent some time track­ing: why the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute–an offi­cially non-​partisan, unof­fi­cially Repub­li­can orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to pro­mot­ing “freedom”–with­held the results of a Kenyan exit poll that showed Raila Odinga (and not Mwai Kibaki, the even­tual winner) had won the 2007 pres­i­den­tial elections.

My sug­ges­tion, which I first noted last Jan­u­ary in response to an Alex Halperin arti­cle at Slate, was that the IRI didn’t release the poll because they didn’t want Odinga to win. This was essen­tially con­firmed by a Nation arti­cle that came out a few months ago.

The front-​page Times piece (by Jef­frey Get­tel­man–who is gen­er­ally good–and Mike McIn­tyre–whom I don’t rec­og­nize) doesn’t offer much in the way of new infor­ma­tion, but it does throw cold water on the IRI’s offi­cial excuse expla­na­tion for with­hold­ing the exit poll:

An exam­i­na­tion by The New York Times found that the offi­cial expla­na­tion for with­hold­ing the poll — that it was tech­ni­cally flawed — had been dis­puted by at least four people involved in the institute’s Kenya oper­a­tions. The exam­i­na­tion, includ­ing inter­views and a review of e-mail mes­sages and inter­nal mem­o­ran­dums, raises ques­tions about the inten­tions and pri­or­i­ties of Amer­i­can observers as Kenyans des­per­ately sought cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion about the vote.

If you read the whole story you’ll quickly come across these lines:

None of those inter­viewed pro­fessed to know why the insti­tute with­held the results. But the deci­sion was con­sis­tent with other Amer­i­can actions that seemed focused on pre­serv­ing sta­bil­ity in Kenya, rather than deter­min­ing the actual winner.

But forget them, it’s just Get­tle­man and McIn­tyre cov­er­ing their jour­nal­is­tic asses. The real story is told by Ken Flottman, the head of the IRI’s Kenya oper­a­tions, who was also a key source for the Nation story:

Behind the scenes, Mr. Flottman recalled, the ambas­sador was even more direct. A few months before the elec­tion, Mr. Ran­neberger pro­posed releas­ing a voter survey show­ing Mr. Kibaki ahead and trying to block a roughly simul­ta­ne­ous one favor­ing Mr. Odinga, accord­ing to Mr. Flottman, who said he wit­nessed the episode during a meet­ing at the ambassador’s office. The sug­ges­tion was dropped, he said, after the embassy learned that the pro-​Odinga results were already out.

“It was clear, in my opin­ion, that the ambas­sador was trying to influ­ence the per­cep­tions of the Kenyan elec­torate, and thus the cam­paign,” Mr. Flottman said.

Flottman also said that senior IRI off­i­cals opposed the release:

Most opposed to releas­ing the num­bers, Mr. Flottman said, was Con­stance Berry Newman, the insti­tute board member lead­ing the mon­i­tor­ing del­e­ga­tion. In an e-mail mes­sage to another del­e­ga­tion member shortly after the elec­tion, Mr. Flottman said Ms. Newman opposed “any kind of release from the outset — essen­tially sug­gest­ing it would be inflam­ma­tory and irresponsible.”

The Times notes that Newman used to work with Ran­neberger “when she was the Bush administration’s assis­tant sec­re­tary of state for African affairs,” but it leaves it up to us to con­nect the dots: the Bush admin­is­tra­tion didn’t like Odinga; Newman, as a State Dept. offi­cial, knew that; and so she went to work thwart­ing the IRI’s Kenya office while Ran­neberger did every­thing he could on his end to make sure Kibaki won. In other words: the IRI was med­dling, pure and simple, just like they did in Haiti.

If you’ve made it this far, then you deserve a bonus, so here’s a fun fact: before his dis­grace, Barack Obama’s father (also named Barack Obama) worked in the Kenyan gov­ern­ment while Raila Odinga’s father (also named Raila Odinga) was vice-​president.