Tag Archives: IRI

Republican senators remaining on Board of IRI following Rubio’s resignation to become Secretary of State are silent on takedown of USAID and NED — both as Senators and as Board members

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Hard to understand why Senator Sullivan continues to serve as IRI Board Chair given that the Senate has not even had hearings relating to the “woodchippering” of USAID, the freeze of State Department foreign assistance funding and the separate impoundment of appropriated funds for NED.

Nor is he reportedly willing to speak in any detail to the press or offer any public defense of NED or IRI under attack from Elon Musk and his X platform and laying off most staff due to the defunding.

What is a Board Chairman for?

The others who sit in both the Senate and on the IRI Board are Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst and Lindsey Graham.

All USAID implementation partners are in a terrible conflict not of their own making starting from the Musk “woodchippering” of USAID and accompanying assault through X on the weekend after the Inauguration. But IRI is also one of the four NED “core institutions” and a “Government Organized NGO” pursuant to legislation. IRI and it Board Members themselves are targets of the X-led digital smear campaign in support of the elimination of U.S. foreign assistance. If IRI leadership is unwilling to speak up to defend IRI, who else should be expected to.

Why should it fall on people like me, as private citizens, and in my case one with a mixed experience working for IRI years ago, to advocate for the underlying value and values served by democracy assistance and “mending not ending” the enterprise?

Of course it does need to be noted that IRI does raise private donations as a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charitable, religious, educational or scientific organization. During my time, no private funds were available for our East Africa program activities as opposed to things such as Board activities or Washington approved extras that were not allowable costs to the Government. So the Board may be able to sustain itself separately from the actual democracy assistance programs?

[Updated] Ruto term nears halfway point as USAID is strangled and Kenyan politics faces disruption from loss at Raila AUC vote Saturday

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Update 2-15: Raila fell short to Djibouti’s candidate in the 7th round of voting.

If Raila Odinga doesn’t win his election for Chairman of the African Union Commission on Saturday then Ruto on one hand and the ODM Party on the other will have to face the question of how to repurpose Raila within Kenya’s political establishment. Will he return to the customary role as opposition presidential candidate? Will he and Ruto reach a deal on a new alternative role to keep him and his key loyalists “onside” with the Ruto presidency?

Is there any chance that he would take some “senior statesman” status within ODM and/or the opposition more broadly and not move toward a run for the Presidency in 2027?

What will be the impact of the demise of US democracy assistance, being cemented as this is written, have on the hugely delayed preparations for the 2027 elections?

Mzalendo reports today on claims that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission—intended to be a permanent Government of Kenya institution under the 2010 Constitution—may have a selection panel in place by April of this year to start the process of selecting Commissioners. USAID has been the leading donor for process for decades.

See this piece from The Standard:

Addis setback, a political turning point for both opposition and government

He returns home empty handed, leaving his admirers divided and his detractors wary. There are those who want the Raila to take up his role of calling the government back to order.www.standardmedia.co.ke

Raila Odinga Kenya president campaign

Book bitings: how the National Endowment for Democracy was born in “strategic fuzziness” in 1983 (and why it is neither a “CIA cutout” nor a conventional NGO)

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Kenya Election Day 2007

I very much enjoyed recently reading Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy in the Reagan Administration by Robert Pee, from 2016 in the Routledge Studies in U.S. Foreign Policy series.

“Robert Pee delivers a carefully crafted, nuanced, and comprehensive study of the rise of democracy promotion as a critical component of US foreign policy under the Reagan administration. The analysis is insightful and sophisticated, offering an excellent understanding of the sources of tensions that animate US democracy promotion’s purpose and practices from its inception to the present days.” Blurb from Dr. Jeff Bridoux from Aberystwyth University, UK.

I highly recommend Pee’s book for anyone involved in or interacting with American democracy assistance. The detailed story of how NED, and NDI, IRI and CIPE as three or the four NED core institutions, “happened” is illuminating and important.

A critical factor that is lost, if not deliberately swept under the rug, in much of the internet commentary that has been generated in contemporary environments, is the fundamental institutional role of Congress in establishing NED.

In the very earliest part of the new Reagan Administration from 1981 the question of democracy assistance was on the table as an aspect of the foreign policy challenges of the late Cold War. Most acutely because of the challenge presented by the Solidarity movement and related happenings in Poland on one hand and the civil war in El Salvador and the revolution in Nicaragua on the other. Within the Administration there were a variety of leading actors and voices reflecting a range of viewpoints. Key questions included consideration of what was beneficial and what was necessary in terms of intellectual and ideological commitments to freedom in the context of the risks of confrontation with the Soviet Union, the stability of the “containment” order and hopes for arms control and other negotiations. Reagan was elected as a critic of President Carter’s new formal policy emphasis on “human rights” as ineffectual in the context of the events such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage-taking by students at the embassy in Iran. So something new and distinguishable was needed. While CIA director William Casey was one of those voices he was far from the only one.

In the meantime, aspirations for democracy assistance had been percolating in academia and civil society since the 1970s. It is essential to place this in the historical context of the post-Vietnam era, and in Pee’s emphasis the era post-Ramparts magazine expose in 1967 of widespread CIA cultural and intellectual subsidies.

In his famous Westminster address to the British Parliament of June 1982 President Reagan made the public commitment to a policy of democracy promotion. With that threshold crossed, the Administration had to come up with actual policy details and bureaucratic structure and the game was on. Reagan’s speech is well worth a re-read, especially to remind of the difficult Cold War context presented by Reagan’s dual commitment to both Strategic Arms Limitation talks with the Soviets and to Solidarity and Poland’s quest “to be Poland”.

Initially those voices of “conservative” caution and constraint who wished the national security structures of the White House to hold the reins won the initial bureaucratic struggle reflected in the Administration’s proposed “Project Democracy” legislation. But however hard it may be to remember this now, in 1983, Congress was a truly co-equal force on these types of foreign policy decisions and the Administration’s proposed “Project Democracy” approach died for lack of support.

In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate environment, Reagan faced a “permanent” Democratic Party majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate with a range of important and influential thought and action leaders in both parties, with an ideological range in each that would be unthinkable today. Congressional debates on foreign policy were highly engaged and unpredictable. Seniority and Committee structures had greater weight.

And thus the National Endowment for Democracy happened in “strategic fuzziness” as Pee elucidates. At a specific time and place the sausage was made. The Administration had committed to democracy assistance as a new tool of foreign policy and Congress delivered a separate organization “endowed” with funding from Congressional appropriations but not in form a government agency nor reporting to the National Security Council. IRI and NDI which had been incorporated as nonprofits at the Republican and Democratic National Committees respectively earlier that year became “core institutions” of NED and CIPE was formed at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to join the longstanding international “free labor union” arm of the AFL-CIO which became the other two “core institutions”.

NED was made subject by Congress to the Freedom of Information Act and to audit, but not reporting to the White House. Early gambits to restructure NED to bring it under Administration control were defeated. After forty years NED is a both a fixture of “Washington” and a unique creature born of a specific confluence of global events, policy aspirations and domestic democratic politics in the United States in 1983.

[In reference to my previous posts, this background can explain, in addition to more important things, why Carl Gershman as fledgling NED’s president would have been attracted to having use of Henry Kissinger’s perceived “stature” and “gravitas” inside-the-Beltway” in Washington as a NED board member even if Kissinger was not interested enough in the mission relative to his other priorities to be able to attend the meetings.]

Power as an aphrodisiac – Kissinger’s legacy at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was to add “a degree of prestige and credibility that we needed during our early period”

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I wanted to follow up on my previous post “What is Henry Kissinger’s legacy as a board member at the National Endowment for Democracy?” in light of some comments from one of my much younger friends in academia who also works with and studies democratization assistance. Here are excerpts from Kissinger’s NED files at Yale:

First, I want to make sure not to conflate or overly compress the time period of Kissinger’s service on NED’s Board (1985-89) during the Second Reagan Administration and the time period of the Second George W. Bush Administration when I worked for the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Kenya (2007-08) administering NED and USAID democracy assistance programs. Or the ensuing First Obama Administration when IRI gave Kissinger its 2009 “Freedom Award” and The New York Times published an investigation on the IRI Kenya presidential exit poll I had managed.

I privately noted back when it happened the irony of IRI choosing Kissinger as its recipient for this democracy award in 2009 in the context of IRI’s focused work in the 21st Century on democratization efforts in Cambodia, Bangladesh and East Timor for instance, in the wake of Kissinger’s record as US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford Administrations in the 1970s in regard to those specific countries. This background then led me in 2023 on Kissinger’s death to learn the overlooked (by me) fact that Kissinger had previously served on NED’s Board. This in turn led to my undertaking initial research – not with the implication that there was something “sinister” whereby Kissinger’s NED role might have been subversive of NED program goals as such – but rather to try to understand the history in light of the obvious dissonance or irony between Kissinger’s approach in Government and the democratization priorities of NED as an institution.

Going through the digitized portions of Kissinger’s NED files at Yale at least seems to confirm: “One is left with the impression that Kissinger might have been something of a foreign affairs celebrity/senior statesman board member who did not heavily engage with NED governance.”

Second, focusing then on the specific years (1985-89) that Kissinger actually served on the Board, we have the very tail end of the Cold War, with Kissinger pushed into resigning by early 1989 by the non-attendance policy, just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We don’t know one way or the other what Kissinger’s role might have been in regard to Post-Cold War NED democratization work, just that he was not able or willing to find much time in 1985-89 and that his departure was unrelated to the cataclysmic change in international relations and democratization about to take place. The one specific contraposition between Kissinger in the US Government in the First and Second Nixon Administrations and Kissinger on the NED Board involved support for electoral democracy in Chile.

As I noted in my previous post, Kissinger did not attend NED Board meetings approving the programming on the Pinochet plebiscite but did sign off on a solicited consent for the list of programs including Chile after the meeting. So nothing to indicate that Kissinger used his post-Government role at NED to oppose a restoration of democratic elections in Chile.

At the same time, I cannot imagine that there was not some bit of heartburn within the Democratic Party side of the bipartisan NED family about the irony of Kissinger’s role as to Chile even though so much more was still classified in those years than is public knowledge now. (Not to assume that all Democrats opposed Nixon and Kissinger’s Chile policy, or all Republicans excused it, but it did become a source of contention among Republicans and Democrats as well as Right and Left in U.S. politics during those 1970 to 1989 years.)

It is worth noting that the files contain some correspondence in which the NDI President at the time, Brian Atwood, chides NED President Carl Gershman over NED’s public relations approach, which Atwood saw as inappropriately attributing to NED the programing success of NDI on the Chile plebiscite.

It may be that NED was not really in a position to compete as a nonprofit corporation with profit making businesses for Kissinger’s board services, since they did not have fees or stock to offer in compensation. As to what Kissinger received for lending his name, I see it as just one more way in which he distanced his reputation from his extremely controversial policy record—most especially on “democracy”, “freedom” and such ideals. How could a democracy NGO like IRI give Kissinger it’s highest award? Why not, when he had already been a Board Member for the National Endowment for Democracy many years before? Even had Nixon lived much longer, it was much easier to give such an award to Kissinger than to Nixon even though Nixon had so much more involvement in electoral democracy than Kissinger ever did.

I write this on January 6, a date that will live in some degree of infamy in the annals of democratization in the United States. Last night driving home from a family trip I heard on BBC a discussion of the state of democracy in the world with a scholar noting V-DEM research showing democratic rescission has reached the level of 1986 – during the Cold War and Kissinger’s time on the NED Board. See the 2023 V-DEM Democracy Report “Defiance in tbe Face of Autocractization” here. How serious are Americans, especially inside the Washington establishment, about democracy as a priority among our various competing interests? Why haven’t we been more successful in our democratization efforts? Should we do anything different or should we rather double down on making sure not to entertain questions?

With NED turning 40 years old this year – and an obvious and immediate challenge to my children’s freedom and that of their generation worldwide – I would rather not risk “going along to get along” .

What is Henry Kissinger’s legacy as a board member at the National Endowment for Democracy? (Updated 12-14-23)

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Greetings and Happy Human Rights Day!

Henry Kissinger served on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the early years of the Endowment during the second Reagan Administration, from 1985 to 1989. Thus during the wind down and end of the Cold War.

For a good scene setter noting Kissinger’s role, see “Missionaries for Democracy: US Aid for Global Pluralism”, in the June 1, 1986 New York Times.

This position for Kissinger had escaped my attention until with the news of his death I looked back at the early 2009 press release from the International Republican Institute (IRI) announcing that Kissinger would receive that year’s IRI “Freedom Award”. (Given that IRI was promoting democracy in Cambodia, Bangladesh and East Timor among other places where Kissinger’s government service record in relation to democracy issues was well known by then to have been, shall we say politely “controversial”, I was a bit taken aback. Obviously Kissinger was a primo draw for a D.C. foreign policy establishment fundraising dinner but I was still surprised at the specific symbolism for IRI.)

I first visited NED in June 2007 as the new IRI Resident Director for East Africa on my way out to Nairobi. I met with Bronwyn Bruton, longtime DC Africa hand, who was managing the East Africa grant portfolio at NED which would fund much of our IRI work in Kenya (assuming approval at a meeting of the NED board which I also attended) along with her boss Dave Peterson who has been NED’s Africa Director dating back to Kissinger’s time on the board in 1988.

It was only in the summer of 2009, after I was back at Northrop Grumman in Mississippi and my dustup with Ambassador Ranneberger over the Kenya IRI/USAID exit poll and election observation had been on the front page of the New York Times that I attended a public Kenya program at NED and got to meet longtime President Carl Gershman and other executives. (I have written about that event previously in regards to Kenya.)

With Kissinger’s death the copyright on material he produced in his NED papers at Yale has passed from Dr. Kissinger to the University. I have spent time this weekend looking at what the Yale Library has digitized on-line of the six boxes. I have reached out to a couple of friends in the academic world who work with the study of democracy assistance to see if they are interested in collaborating with a layman/practitioner to study this.

Some interesting things I have learned so far: Kissinger was not on the initial board of directors when NED was established in 1984 following passage of the enabling legislation in December 1983, but was sent an invitation by Mr. Gershman in December 1984 following discussions that fall. Kissinger accepted in late January explaining that his response had been delayed by his travel schedule.

Most of the material is just copies of NED board correspondence, but there are slips and notes indicating his many scheduling conflicts between Kissinger & Associates business, corporate boards and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

By late 1988 Kissinger had received a letter from NED’s outside general counsel noting that his three straight absences from board meetings would necessitate his removal by policy, but that there would an opportunity at the next meeting to present “extenuating circumstances” to excuse the attendance issue. After some confusion on whether he had automatically been removed, Kissinger submitted his letter of resignation because of his other time commitments in January 1989.

One is left with the impression that Kissinger might have been something of a foreign affairs celebrity/senior statesman board member who did not heavily engage with NED governance.

Perhaps ironically as to Kissinger, the big feather in NED’s cap in late 1988 was deploying a special Congressional appropriation along with other funds to support in Chile the “no (to General Pinochet)” campaign in the plebiscite that Pinochet had called on continued military rule.

NED funded usual Chilean civil society type programs as well as the funding to NDI for the campaign which among other things paid for three American political consultants, including Glen Cowan of Francis, McGinnis & Rees, who pioneered the NDI-funded PVT through the opposition parties and through the local “Committee for Free Elections”. NDI, according to their quotes in clips circulated by Mr. Gershman to his board, added private funding to the US Government funding provided through NED.

It might be that as a private citizen and businessman by 1988 Dr. Kissinger was no longer intensely interested in Chile or General Pinochet; perhaps he sort of informally recused himself from the NED board in the context of Reagan’s second term pivot reflected in Mr. Gershman’s description (“the basic concept was to promote a peaceful and stable democratic transition”). Maybe he now supported democracy in Chile affirmatively to the point he did not feel it necessary to show up? Without being able to ask him, maybe we can learn more going forward.

National Journal piece on NED and NDI Chile work cited favorably to NED board members

[This Chile work was the origin of the NDI-funded PVT programs that I have written about in Kenya’s 2013 and subsequent elections, as well as in the most recent elections in Malawi and DRC. There are some big differences between the late Cold War NED NDI Chile work in 1988 and the application of the tool by USAID in conjunction with their other democracy programing in 21st Century Africa.

Glenn Cowan joined Eric Bjornlund from NDI in forming Democracy International (DI) in 2003 and published an extensive Vote Count Verification User’s Guide for USAID following a wide consultation among implementors in 2010. They gave me a valued copy several years ago. I will hope to write more about this after catching up with old friends at DI and elsewhere.]

For more from NDI, see the 40th Anniversary retrospective at “NDI: BOLSTERING GENUINE ELECTIONS TO SECURE DEMOCRACY – THROUGH CITIZEN AND INTERNATIONAL ELECTION OBSERVATION”.

NED Memo of 9-87 announcing 1988 Board Meetings (January 1988 was Kissinger’s last, followed by January 1989 resignation.)

UPDATE: Continued research shows that Kissinger attended no more than one NED Board meeting after the spring of 1987, but executed a consent on June 28, 1988 approving the NED grants supported by those members who attended the June 5, 1987 meeting, including 6 grants to NDI, among them “Chile: Promoting Free and Fair Elections -$110,172”.

Reporting keeps digging deeper on US decision to “look away” from stolen DRCongo election

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The latest breakthrough is from Stephen R. Weissman in Foreign Policy this week: “Why did Washington let a stolen election stand in the Congo?“. Weissman gets significantly more detail than the previous stories have accumulated on the Catholic church organized and U.S. subsidized “parallel vote tabulation”:

This account is based primarily on 20 interviews—including 10 with U.S. officials—that were conducted on background and without attribution to promote candor. Foreign Policy offered the U.S. State Department the opportunity to comment on passages stemming from interviews with U.S. officials, but it declined.

In a Jan. 3, 2019 press statement, the State Department urged CENI to transparently count votes and “ensure” its results “correspond to results announced at each of DRC’s 75,000 polling stations.” At the same time, the department ignored the one resource that could have held the Kabila-dominated, corruption-laden CENI to account: the church’s U.S.-funded election observation project.

Weissman has delivered the type of detailed story that I had always hoped to see some enterprising journalist write about the decision to “look away” from election fraud in Kenya in 2007–in particular what I hoped the New York Times was in the process of reporting in 2008 when I was interviewed about the “spiked” exit poll indicating an opposition win. The DRC is not a close U.S. ally and regional center for the “international community” in the same way that Kenya is, so perhaps the DRC is a more realistic venue for a tougher examination of mixed messages and mixed motives. Also, because violence did not explode in DRC in 2019 it is easier for officials involved to talk to reporters (without personal attribution) about the decision making process.

The next step for reporters who are interested would obviously be to pursue the documentary record.

Regardless, the paradigm is the same in terms of the choices between “diplomacy” and transparency in election assistance and election observation.

Lake lodge Uganda Rwanda Congo

Should there be an international Code of Conduct for Exit Polls and Parallel Vote Tabulations?

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[As the year winds down and things crank up in Kenya’s 2022 presidential campaign and BBI referendum I am going through some of my old unpublished drafts – this is an idea that could matter that the parties involved do not have an incentive to bring forward.]

To me, the answer to the headline question is clearly “yes”.

Very specifically to my experience as in Kenya in 2007 as International Republican Institute Resident East Africa Director, I was able to explain to the USAID Kenya Mission that we at IRI were bound as a party to a published International Code of Conduct in conducting an International Election Observation that required us to maintain independence from the Ambassador.

(Readers may recall that then-Ambassador Ranneberger had pushed for a USAID-funded IRI Election Observation Mission for Kenya’s 2007 election which USAID had decided not to conduct in their ordinary planning process for the election and that IRI did not seek to undertake.)

We on the IRI staff were able to push back on Ambassador Ranneberger’s desire to select Election Observation Mission delegates, although we ended up informally going along with Ranneberger’s choice of Connie Newman and Chester Crocker as lead delegates (Crocker was not available to travel on the dates required).

The rest of the delegates were our choices rather than the Ambassador’s and we resisted Ranneberger’s expressed desire to remove his predecessor Amb. Mark Bellamy from the Observation until Ranneberger “laid down a marker” as he put it.

Likewise, we invited against Ranneberger’s wishes Bellamy’s predecessor as Ambassador to Kenya, Johnnie Carson, who was then the Africa lead at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and later Assistant Secretary of State under Obama (Carson was not cleared to participate–I was privately relieved for two reasons: it got me off the hook on a potential conflict with Ranneberger and while Carson seemed like a real asset for the Observation I thought the optics of having a high ranking Executive Branch employee and particularly one directly in an Intelligence Community job would not be great from an independence standpoint. In hindsight it might have done some real good to have him there.).

Unfortunately, on the now perhaps infamous Exit Poll, I was more or less naked in dealing with USAID and the Ambassador. The polling program was under a separate Cooperative Agreement between the CEPPS (IRI, NDI and IFES) and USAID which had started with the Exit Poll for the 2005 Constitutional Referendum. (The defeat of the proposed “Wako Draft” Constitution gave rise to the Orange Democratic Party which led Kenya’s opposition in the 2007, 2013 and 2017 elections, culminating in the March 2018 “handshake” and the present “Building Bridges Initiative” referendum campaign).

The 2005-07 polling program was scheduled to end with a public opinion survey in September 2007, well ahead of the general election, the date of which was not set until weeks later. USAID amended the Agreement to add the general election Exit Poll at the end. It was only after I initially reported a few days before the election that we were going to have to cancel the Exit Poll due to the objection of Electoral Commission of Kenya Chairman Samuel Kivuitu that I was told by USAID that the Exit Poll as a higher priority for the Ambassador than the Election Observation itself. Kivuitu’s acquiescence was achieved.

On the late afternoon of Election Day as I was dragging my feet on releasing preliminary numbers before the polls closed I was told that “the whole reason” for doing the Exit Poll was for “early intelligence” for the Ambassador and USAID went to our subcontracted polling firm to get the figures. [Remember that I covered all this in complaints to the Inspectors General at USAID and State.]

IRI had no established backstop to protect itself from interference on the Exit Poll because unlike on the Election Observation Mission there was no published Code or Agreement that I could use to push back to preserve our independence.

We had agreed internally at IRI that we should not report any Exit Poll numbers externally including to USAID or the Embassy until the polls closed, and it was quite clear that we had no contractual obligation to make a report during the vote. But given that USAID was willing to go underneath us to the pollster it was out of our hands literally and there were no clear standards beyond that.

The US Government ultimately had rights to our data as a matter of government contracts law and USAID had arguably and ambiguously constrained our ability to release the Exit Poll results to the public in the Amendment to the Cooperative Agreement funding the Exit Poll by providing for “consultation” with the Embassy on “diplomatic or other” considerations. The Cooperative Agreement for the Program was neither classified nor available publicly until I had it released under the Freedom of Information Act years later. The Exit Poll from the 2005 Referendum had been released.

Fortunately we have not seen another disaster quite like Kenya 2007-08, but the questions about transparency and release and reporting of information from election verification and anti-fraud tools are still there. For instance in the most recent elections in the DRC and Malawi, as well as the controversy in Kenya in 2013. This could be addressed by pre-established standards or codes if donors, host governments and democracy assistance organizations or implementers are willing to give up some of their case-by-case flexibility and frankly some of the power of controlling information.

Kenya USAID IRI poll release press conference
Kenya USAID IRI poll release press conference

Election Observation and Democracy Assistance: what is CEPPS?

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CEPPS stands for the the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening; the members are the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES).

Although CEPPS has been functioning as a USAID master funding mechanism for Cooperative Agreements for Democracy Assistance since the early post-Cold War era in 1995, it is only more recently that it has started to take on a more public face as an entity as opposed to the three constituent organizations. (See the explanation from their branding strategists here [with the colorful image of a Masaii woman voting])

While I have no idea why this has evolved in recent times, I will note that building up CEPPS as an “entity” with its own brand could be seen from outside as a way to establish an alternative structure directly tied to USAID in competition with funding for democracy assistance through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

IRI and NDI are two of four core NED institutions. IRI and NDI were incorporated by the leaders of the Republican and Democratic National Committees respectively, pursuant to the legislation establishing the National Endowment for Democracy as private organization, with a bipartisan board and Congressionally-appropriated funding and subject to the Freedom of Information Act. (The other two NED core institutions are the Center for International Private Enterprise [CIPE] affiliated with the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Solidarity Center affiliated with the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations or AFL-CIO.)

IFES, on the other hand, which the branding material describes as a “core institution” of CEPPS, borrowing the NED terminology for the consortium members, is a more explicitly “private” entity created in 1987, four years later in than NED, during the second Reagan Administration, at the instance of then-USAID Director Peter McPherson as he describes in a 2017 interview on the IFES website. McPherson went to a American political campaign manager with a “bipartisan tone,” Cliff White (known publicly primarily for his role as Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign manager) to found the nonprofit because among the contractors USAID used there was a lack of technical expertise on the mechanics of organizing and holding elections. USAID provided an initial grant but IFES is not part of the Congressional mandate and annual budget appropriation process of NED and its four “core institutions” including IRI and NDI.

Readers will remember that IFES is a nonprofit corporation (like IRI and NDI) and was registered as such with the Kenyan government when President Kenyatta and his party leaders and government officials attacked IFES for not being registered as an “NGO” in late 2016 and early 2017 and allegedly being too cooperative with the opposition while managing the USAID election assistance and supporting the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Of course since IFES had been working on the same basis in essentially the same role with ECK since 2001 under Samuel Kivuitu’s Chairmanship and the IIEC and then IEBC under Issack Hassan, I saw this as pre-election “muscle flexing” by the incumbent President Kenyatta and his coalition directed at both the new Chebukati-led Independent Commission taking office in January to replace Hassan’s group after opposition protests and at IFES. The democracy donor diplomatic group led by US Ambassador Godec pushed back but Kenyatta’s Administration used its control of Immigration to force out the IFES Country Director and another key IFES employee. An outside replacement Country Director was “parachuted in” mid-March for the August 8 election.

See also “USAID is using a model for Kenya election assistance contracting that creates unnecessary conflicts of interest between organizations supporting election observation, voter education and embedded support to the Election Commission“.

Here is a discussion of USAID use of CEPPs from a review conducted by the Office of Inspector General for USAID focused on Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East released November 26, 2019, titled “Additional Actions Are Needed to Improve USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Programs”:

CEPPS was founded in 1995 by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), and holds a global Leader with Associate assistance award with the DRG Center to implement a variety of DRG activities, including political party assistance programs.

According to USAID officials, CEPPS received a series of global assistance awards from USAID for 1995 through 2020, which helped CEPPS partners develop a capacity to deliver political party assistance programming and establish a global footprint with a presence in every region in which USAID operates. The current global assistance mechanism was awarded in 2015 (a cooperative agreement) and provides missions the option to offer funding opportunities directly to CEPPS rather than develop a notice of funding opportunity locally.

Agency mission and headquarters personnel reported that, overall, CEPPS partners have excellent technical leadership and organizational experience to work collaboratively with host-country political leaders. CEPPS partners have developed strong work relationships with local stakeholders in many countries and are acknowledged as global leaders in the DRG sector. For example, in Ukraine, mission officials praised the NDI, IRI, and IFES Chiefs of Party as outstanding leaders who are highly accomplished and respected in their areas of expertise. They noted that the technical skills and positive reputations of these individuals are an asset for the mission and its DRG portfolio.

However, Agency officials also noted that missions often default to working with CEPPS partners through USAID’s global assistance award with the DRG Center—instead of pursuing opportunities to partner with other organizations that can provide similar services. Relying on CEPPS gives significant influence to a small group of partners to implement political party assistance programs and increases USAID’s reputational risk. Specific concerns reported to us by USAID officials include:

• NDI, IRI, and IFES have significant political connections and powerful benefactors on their boards of directors, including sitting Members of the U.S. Congress, former Ambassadors, and other political appointees. NDI and IRI in particular could be perceived as extensions of the U.S. Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively, by host-country stakeholders. For example, NDI’s website acknowledges that it has a “loose affiliation” with the U.S. Democratic Party and IRI’s current Chairman is a U.S. Senator in the Republican Party.

• In Georgia, CEPPS attempted to exclude a host-country democratic political party. In a 2017 letter to USAID/Georgia written on behalf of NDI and IRI, CEPPS stated that it would temporarily suspend assistance to a Georgian political party because of media reports of derogatory remarks made by party leaders about CEPPS partner staff, along with CEPPS’s disagreement with the party’s political platform and rhetoric. The mission responded to CEPPS’s letter by directing NDI and IRI to continue delivering assistance to the Georgian political party in compliance with USAID’s Political Party Assistance Policy.

In March 2017, before USAID started releases on my FOIA request on 2013 Kenya election, I called job of new IFES Country Director “the hardest in Kenya” and “probably impossible”

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Read the whole post here:  The hardest job in Kenya . . .

. . . .

Realistically, the job looks impossible as structured, even if there had been adequate preparation time because of the conflicts of interest that USAID has built into the the role.  Compounding the problems from 2007 and 2013, USAID chose to select one entity to manage the inside technical support for the IEBC as per the IFES role since 2001 with the ECK/IIEC/IEBC, to provide voter education and also to lead election observation.  Thus IFES is wearing both “insider” and “outsider” hats at the same time, when the contradictory responsibilities of working with and observing the IEBC are both hugely challenging and vitally important.

Kenya 2013: Redacted reports to USAID suggest the problems with the IEBC acquisition of the Biometric Voter Registration system and the electronic Poll Books fed into the ultimate failure of the USAID-funded IFES Results Transmission System

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Excerpts from the unredacted portions of the Quarterly Reports submitted by CEPPS, the Coalition for Political Party and Process Strengthening, to USAID, released to me last month per my 2015 FOIA request:

The overall goal of this program [USAID Kenya Election and Political Process Strengthening or “KEPPS”] is to improve Kenya’s ability to hold free, fair and peaceful elections through support of the new electoral commission, political parties, civil society and media.

The reports show that key Objectives included to “Strengthen Election Management Body Capacity,” “Enhance Functionality of the Electronic Results Transmission System,” “Further the Transparency and Effectiveness of the Voter Registration Process,” and “Support Credible and Sustainable Monitoring and Observation Efforts”. Vast amounts of the material is redacted on the assertion of alleged FOIA exemption for confidential commercial information submitted by a private person. Redaction is so aggressive as to include in some instances blocking the entire list of Objectives, although the specific items listed above show up elsewhere.

The USAID program was originally funded for $18.5M from the Second Quarter of 2011 through the Second Quarter of 2014 (with another year and roughly $5M added through amendments). The original funding was split among the Consortium for Election and Political Process Strengthening parties: IFES $6M; IRI $1.5M; NDI $11M.

Future Activities:

[Redacted section]

*Assisting the IEBC in procurement of the Electronic Poll Books, specifically technical evaluation of the offers (This was planned for the current quarter but was delayed by IEBC).

*Guiding IEBC in development of procedures and training programs for voter registration workers (Also delayed by IEBC due to delays in procurement of BVR equipment).

*Providing a consultant to serve as assistant to the Chairman of IEBC during the absence of his Personal Assistant who has accepted a fellowship to continue his studies.

The tension among the Objectives involving imbedded support to the IEBC and support for credible monitoring and observation was apparent very early on in the Quarterly Reports.

Planning for the results transmission was derailed to a great extent by the repeated cycles of crisis with regard to the BVR procurement. Meetings scheduled with the IEBC to plan for a system were repeatedly cancelled as a fresh new crisis seemed to occur weekly and even daily.

The risk of failure of the electronic poll books procurement jeopardized the planned use of the poll books to enter results from each polling station, and may necessitate a return to mobile phones. In spite of the increased complexity of conducting elections with six [REDACTED Section].

Objective 5 [of USAID program]: Enhance the functionality of the electronic Results Transmission System.
* Specifications have been developed for using mobile phone handsets as a contingency in case the procurement for electronic poll books fails.

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Voter registration timelines announced by the IEBC lapsed repeatedly as a result of delays in the acquisition of BVR kits. Unable to settle on a vendor and a system at the end of August, the IEBC announced that it would instead revert to the manual register for the elections. However, the Cabinet exerted great pressure on the IEBC to retain the use of a BVR system and subsequently took over the tender process, negotiating directly with the Canadian Government for delivery of a BVR system …

The decision of the government to pressure IEBC to proceed with BVR, without regard for delays caused by this decision, and IEBC’s inability to resist that pressure has created a high-risk schedule with no room for slippage in planning for March 4, 2013 elections.

At the same time, IFES was working on “Restoring the eroding levels of public confidence in the integrity and competence of the IEBC” and “Ensuring an efficient and transparent vote count and results transmission system”.

But was not the public ultimately correct to have declining confidence in the integrity and competence of the IEBC, both in the lead up to the vote, and in light of the ultimate failures with both the questionably acquired Poll Books and the Results Transmission System?

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Fourth Quarter of 2012:

The Results Transmission System (RTS) solution procurement process was commenced during this Quarter and an in-house RTS was developed and presented to the IEBC as a backup system [REDACTED Section].

Results Transmission: IFES has continued to collaborate closely with the IEBC in the creation of a fully working prototype of the overall Results Transmission System. IFES has also, with approval of the IEBC, agreed to procure a Results Transmission System (RTS) solution and procurement is underway.

———-

For an idea of what was being discussed publicly in the fall of 2012 (when election was originally scheduled) see, i.e.:

August 1, 2012: “Kenyan IEBC drops biometric voter registration after tender controversy“.

October 10, 2012: “Recent Kenya polling points to concern on voter registration, other issues“.

November 27, 2012: “Kenyan diaspora disenfranchised?; Kwamchetsi Makokha raises concern about voter education; IFES seeks consultant“.

The Page of all my posts from the Kenya 2013 election is here.

———-

Ultimately, the Results Transmission System failed in practice. While it was allegedly acquired and deployed with an expectation of reliable performance, it initially displayed unverified and uncertain information that shaped global media reporting of the expected outcome of the eventual vote totals, but was then shut down completely by IEBC Chairman Hassan on the alleged basis of failure due to system overload.

The IEBC went on to announce a final first-round win for the Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto ticket with 50.07 percent of the vote in spite of the lack of the electronic system specified in the Constitution and the lack of a demonstrable manual contingent system and the expelling of party agents and election observers from the national tally process, among other irregularities.

Although polling consistently predicted a runoff in the presidential race, the early broadcast showing numbers from the failed RTS with a large and steady margin with well over 50% for the UhuRuto ticket gave Kenyatta and Ruto and the IEBC substantial practical leverage in opposing civil society litigation (which I supported) seeking an injunction to stop Hassan and the IEBC from announcing results without addressing the RTS failure and shutdown.

This leverage carried over into the Supreme Court as Kenyatta and Ruto and the IEBC defended the alleged 50.07% margin. IFES, according to correspondence and reporting provided at least some support services to the IEBC in litigating alongside Kenyatta and Ruto against Odinga and Musyoka as the opposition candidates and a separate election challenge from civil society. So far as I know the role of IFES in acquiring the RTS with US funds did not come up in the litigation, or in the reports of Election Observers, either those supported by CEPPS under this USAID KEPPS program or otherwise.

Kenya High Court Nairobi AFRICOG lawyer Harun Ndubi press conference 2013 election