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:

Nearly a year ago I com­mented on a Slate arti­cle that won­dered why the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute would with­hold the results of an exit poll that sug­gested Raila Odinga had won the Kenyan pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. My guess:

The answer to Halperin’s ques­tion might there­fore be depress­ingly simple: the IRI won’t release their polling data because they don’t want the wrong guy to win.

Now it looks like my sup­po­si­tion was right. Here are the key sec­tions from Karen Rothmeyer’s “Meddling in Kenya” in The Nation:

The poll…showed that Odinga had bested Kibaki by an eight-​point margin. This was in con­trast to the offi­cial fig­ures released later, amid chaos and alle­ga­tions of rig­ging, that showed Kibaki win­ning by a two-​point margin. Plans called for releas­ing the poll, the only one of its kind…the day after the elec­tion. But instead, IRI’s top Washington-​based offi­cials, claim­ing they had seri­ous doubts about the poll’s valid­ity, refused to make the results public. [IRI coun­try direc­tor Ken] Flottman says he kept press­ing for an answer as to why. “I was even­tu­ally told that it wasn’t in the best inter­est of IRI,” he says.

…

Why did US offi­cials not take note of their own poll? Why did they in fact not just ignore it but sup­press it? “The results were unpalatable,” says one high-​level, non-​American inter­na­tional offi­cial who declines to be iden­ti­fied because of the official’s con­tin­ued work­ing rela­tion­ship with the US government.

See below the fold for the rest of the story.

Today at Slate, Alex Halperin won­ders why a Kenyan exit poll spon­sored by the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute hasn’t been released to the public:

The Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute, a democracy-​fostering non­profit funded by the U.S. government—and despite the name, offi­cially nonpartisan*—commissioned an Elec­tion Day exit poll but has declined to release the results. Two people famil­iar with the results told me that they showed [Raila] Odinga with a sub­stan­tial lead over Pres­i­dent Kibaki—one reported eight points, the other nine points.

Why would the IRI with­hold a poll that showed Odinga in the lead? I’d guess that it has some­thing to do with Odinga’s polit­i­cal past: he trained as an engi­neer in East Ger­many and named his first child Fidel Castro, and his father was an open pro­po­nent of a social­ist polit­i­cal pro­gram. From what I’ve heard from people in the coun­try, Odinga’s (past/present/potential) social­ist ten­den­cies have been a quiet but recur­ring theme in pro-​Kibaki polit­i­cal argu­ments. The answer to Halperin’s ques­tion might there­fore be depress­ingly simple: the IRI won’t release their polling data because they don’t want the wrong guy to win.

UPDATE (12/12/08): Looks like I was right.

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*Note: It may be true, as Halperin argues, that the IRI “missed an oppor­tu­nity to advance its mis­sion of pro­mot­ing democ­racy and fair elections,” but if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, a person famil­iar with the organization’s activ­i­ties in Haiti a decade ago might be excused for doubt­ing the sin­cer­ity of that mis­sion in the first place. Saying that the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute is “officially nonpartisan” is a little like saying that Iran is “officially democratic”: it’s true but pointless.