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.

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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.

Think­ing glob­ally while acting locally has never been more difficult.

The New York Times reports today that CARE has decided to decline $45 mil­lion in fed­eral financ­ing (in the form of food aid) because the pro­gram that sup­plies the aid does more harm than good in the coun­tries it was designed to help.

The charity’s dilemma was a dif­fi­cult one: do you take money that you know will help people con­cretely, or do you reject that money for the sake of a larger but more ethe­real good? It’s not fair to char­ac­ter­ize the deci­sion as one between self-​interest and altru­ism, since even the char­i­ties that remain in the pro­gram are still pre­sum­ably putting the money to good work. But the dilemma is typ­i­cal of one we’re grow­ing more and more accus­tomed to: whether to act in pur­suit of some local, imme­di­ate, and vis­i­ble good or to take a struc­tural approach whose effects will likely be dif­fuse, long term, and invis­i­ble. [Read more]