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: