NAIROBI, Kenya — An exit poll carried out on behalf of a U.S. government-backed foundation indicates that Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki was defeated in last month's disputed election rather than being re-elected as he claims, according to officials with knowledge of the document.
The poll by the Washington-based International Republican Institute — which hasn't been publicly released — further undermines an election result that many international observers have described as flawed. The outcome has sparked protests and ethnically driven clashes that have killed hundreds.
Opposition leader Raila Odinga led Kibaki by roughly 8 percentage points in the poll, which surveyed voters as they left polling places during the election Dec. 27, according to one senior Western official who has seen the data. That's a sharp departure from the results that Kenyan election officials certified, which gave Kibaki a margin of 231,728 votes over Odinga, about 3 percentage points.
U.S. and European observers have criticized the official results, which came after long, unexplained delays in counting the votes, primarily from Kibaki strongholds. Jendayi Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said over the weekend that there were "serious irregularities in the vote tallying, which made it impossible to determine with certainty the final result."
why is it that in a third world country exit polls that don't match the actual tally draw criticism. In the US we blame the media for getting it wrong?
something is wrong here.
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
IP: Logged |
posted
When we need to blame the media is BEFOREhand, when they place more value on their byline than truth or service to the American system by serving up a plague of quasi-gossipy crap they produce as "instructive" of the various candidates qualifications for the office sought.
By doing so, they eliminate from consideration those candidates who are not, by those media standards, colorful enough to provide the BS they choose to print (so they can see their name go along with it), depriving us of a chance to evaluate any candidates that cannot provide enough "gossip" and reducing the actual contest to a bewildering series of negative adds and accusations (almost never of any actual significance with respect to the office in question and generally thought up to whet the appetite of the media) about those few candidates the media wants to cover .
IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic
