So now we have results of both a “Parallel Vote Tabulation” and an Exit Poll for the March 4, 2013 Kenyan election.
The irony here is that the Exit Poll was privately funded, yet we have, courtesy of the video of the initial university presentation by the researchers Dr. Clark Gibson, Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and Dr. James Long, visiting scholar at Harvard and appointed as Asst. Professor at the University of Washington, quite a bit more detail about the Exit Poll data than we do about the PVT. The PVT, however, was funded at least in substantial part, apparently, by yours truly and the rest of the American taxpayers through USAID through NDI. (This is the best information available to me–please correct me if I am wrong.)
I mean no disrespect to any of the people involved at NDI or ELOG–or at USAID for that matter. I am sure everyone did their best on the PVT. But when do we see the details instead of just a conclusion?
After all the controversy about the delay in the release of the USAID-funded IRI Exit Poll in 2007-08, I am just very much surprised that everyone involved this time did not chose to try to get in front of any problems and controversies by being more transparent.
I do not want to weigh in to any of the back and forth as to “which is better” between an Exit Poll and a PVT–in fairness they have their relative strengths and weaknesses–it is best to have both. So let’s get the data out on the table for study and see what we can learn.
Related articles
- “Fraud and Vote Patterns in Kenya’s 2013 Election: Evidence from an Exit Poll” – Gibson and Long event in Washington Thursday (africommons.com)
- Exit poll finds neither Kenyatta nor Odinga were close to 50 per cent (nation.co.ke)
- Exit poll shows Uhuru, Raila tie (nation.co.ke)
- AfriCOG’s Seema Shah asks in Foreign Policy: “Are U.S. election watchdogs enabling bad behavior in Kenya?” (africommons.com)
- Carter Center faults IEBC over results tabulation (businessdailyafrica.com)
- Kenya: Exit Poll fuels debate of IEBC, Supreme Court (allAfrica.com from TheStar)