Poll: Kenyan leader lost election

NAIROBI, KENYA -- Six months after a deeply flawed election triggered a wave of ethnic killings in Kenya, a U.S. government-funded exit poll says that the wrong candidate was declared the winner.

President Mwai Kibaki, whom official results credited with a 2-point margin of victory in the December vote, finished nearly 6 points behind in the exit poll, which was released Tuesday by researchers from the University of California, San Diego.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga scored "a clear win outside the margin of error" according to surveys of voters as they left polling places, the poll's author said.

The incumbent Kibaki was sworn in for a second term despite major irregularities in vote-counting, sparking tribal attacks that killed more than 1,000 people.

The exit poll was financed by the Washington-based International Republican Institute, a nonpartisan democracy-building organization, with a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the foreign-aid arm of the State Department.

Amid a worldwide furor over the election results, the institute decided not to release the poll, citing concerns about its validity. But the poll's authors and the former head of the institute's program in Kenya stand by the research, which the authors presented Tuesday.

In the exit poll, Odinga had 46.07 percent of the vote to 40.17 percent for Kibaki, a difference well outside the poll's margin of error of 1.32 percentage points. The official results gave Kibaki 46.42 percent of the vote to 44.07 percent for Odinga.

Kibaki and Odinga, under international pressure, have formed a fragile coalition government, with Odinga as the prime minister.