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CARACAS, Venezuela - A U.S. pollster whose firm wrongly predicted President Hugo Chavez would lose a recall referendum on Thursday defended the exit poll, which has landed in the center of a national controversy.
The poll by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates has become such a hot issue because the opposition, which spent more than a year mounting the drive to force Chavez from office, insists it shows the results from Sunday's referendum itself were fraudulent.
Former President Jimmy Carter and the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, both monitored the vote and endorsed the referendum results.
The exit poll, released 41/2 hours before voting stations closed, said 59 percent would vote Chavez out of office. But in fact, the opposite was true - Chavez ended up trouncing his enemies and capturing 59 percent of the vote.
Pollster Doug Schoen said his firm has been involved in polling for years and recently correctly called elections in the Dominican Republic and Mexico.
"We've done this all over the world," Schoen said. "To be off by 34 points as we are alleged to be, strains credulity - there was no real independent verification of the electronic count. There was almost certainly fraud in the central counting process."
The opposition also claims electronic voting machines were rigged, but has provided no conclusive evidence.
Carter and Gaviria, both experienced election monitors, have said their independent sampling of results conformed with the official results.
Critics of the exit poll have questioned how it was conducted because Penn, Schoen & Berland worked with a U.S.-funded Venezuela group that the Chavez government considers to have sided with the opposition.
The firm had members of Sumate, a Venezuelan group that helped organize the recall initiative, do the fieldwork for the poll, election observers said.
Schoen said his firm "worked with a wide variety of volunteers that were provided by Sumate" but that they "were trained to administer the poll."
Venezuelan Minister of Communications Jesse Chacon said it was a mistake for Sumate to be involved because it might have skewed the results of the poll.
"If you use an activist as a pollster, he will eventually begin to act like an activist," Chacon told the Associated Press.
Roberto Abdul, a Sumate official, said the nonprofit organization received a $53,400 grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn receives funds from the U.S. Congress but did not use any of those funds to pay for the exit polling.
The issue is potentially explosive because even before the referendum, Chavez himself cited Washington's funding of Sumate as evidence that the Bush administration was financing efforts to oust him - an allegation U.S. officials deny.
Chris Sabatini, senior program officer for the National Endowment for Democracy, defended Sumate as "independent and impartial."
"Exit polls are notoriously unreliable," Sabatini said from Washington. "Just because they're off doesn't mean that the group that conducted them is partial to one side."