Election Fraud in Kenya?
Six months after a deeply flawed election triggered a wave of ethnic killings in Kenya, a U.S. government-funded exit poll finds that the wrong candidate was declared the winner.
Here is the McClatchy piece, which discusses research by political scientists James Long and Clark Gibson of UCSD. (McClatchy first reported on this poll here.)
Long is, however, justifiably cautious, given that exit polls can themselves have problems:
“Our results cannot definitively prove fraud,” Long said. “However, they do highlight important discrepancies in the official vote count that suggest both candidates may have engaged in the artificial production or subtraction of votes.
I cannot find a copy of any report on the exit poll, but will post one when it becomes available.
[Hat tip to Greg Koger.]
Comments
What a horrible graph! The re-coloring and re-ordering of the wedges makes the difference between “official results” and “poll” seem much greater than they are.
Posted by: Andrew![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 9, 2008 09:26 PM
I was going to say exactly what Andrew said. Very misleading pie charts.
And plenty of US exit polls hare off by 6% for one candidate, 2% for another. Is this exit poll supposed to be more reliable?
Posted by: Alex F | July 10, 2008 02:37 AM
I’m with Andrew. I went so far as to redraw the data on a bar chart:
Re: Graphical Propaganda
Posted by: Jon Peltier | July 10, 2008 09:01 AM
Blame McClatchy. I cut-and-pasted their graph to add a little color. Should have remade it myself. Jon, yours is a big improvement.
Posted by: John Sides | July 10, 2008 11:17 AM
I went to the McClatchy article and didn’t see the chart. Just now I went back and saw the link to the graphic. Consider yourself absolved from blame for creating the chart. :)
Posted by: Jon Peltier | July 11, 2008 07:52 AM
I heard that due to safety concerns the pollsters had to stop polling at 3pm and that in some constituencies with contested vote counts the queues to vote were still out the door and down the road at 6.30pm. Also, these constituencies were more likely to be majority Kikuyu, who vote for their candidate, Kibaki, so the exit poll results suffer from sampling bias in the direction that undercuts their results.
Posted by: JO | July 12, 2008 10:45 AM