Recently, there has been various bodies conducting private pre-election polls in Nigeria ahead of 2023 election. These polls are majorly to adjudge the chances of each candidate ahead of the election.
I believe the public should interrogate these polls and their figures more deeply.
Do they reflect popularity alone or possible poll victory?
It is true that polls such as these influences voters and create a bandwagon effect, then who are those sponsoring these polls, what are their objective?
The Bloomberg poll for instance has about 3000 respondents. These respondents were not necessarily proven to be drawn from the voter’s register. How possible is a poll of 3000 representational of 85 million voters?
How can this be shown to be a poll indicating voters intent?
They didn’t poll individuals using the voters register and the contributors to such polls submitted their opinions via a mobile app, knowing fully well that a candidate has a major demography online compare to others.
What poll would be truly representational of the voting population drawn from 774 local government or polling units in Nigeria?
If a poll respondent are predominantly in the urban centres can such poll be rightly adjudged to be representational?
Also, the poll conducted by We2geda; how effective can such poll be when it put random calls to 15,438 registered voters from all 36 States and FCT. That is 15,438 voters out of more than 80 million registered voters, how representational across rural and urban areas can that be of the total voting population.
All these only points to the fact that more polls needs to be conducted using a larger demography of registered voters as participants in their polls as election draws closer privately by political parties and candidates to adjudge the true state of their ballot popularity. Until this is done, then it is not uhuru yet for candidates relying on such polls, not dismissing the fact that such polls can influence bandwagon effect.
Opatola Victor Esq.
adeopatola@gmail.com
