NOIpoll 2023 Presidential Election Survey: Implication  for  democracy in Nigeria

Chris Uba

The NOIpolls’ survey result on the 2023  presidential elections released recently in which Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) was rated  as the preferred choice of voters if the elections were held on the day the polls were taken ,has generated mixed reactions from Nigerians  with many describing it has heavily biased in favour of Obi.

The survey commissioned by the ANAP Foundation placed Obi ahead with 21 per cent. Bola Tinubu, the  presidential candidate of All Progressives Candidate (APC) and Atiku Abubakar, the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), came joint second with 13 per cent each, while  Rabiu Kwankwaso came  a distant third with three per cent.

 The NOIPolls Opinion Polling Centre (NOPC) is a call centre dedicated to capturing the opinions of Nigerians daily.  With the country’s Tele-density at 92 per cent  (NCC Figures), telephone polling provides a quick access to information. The NOPC provides the Polling service.

With very experienced telephone polling analysts from various cultural backgrounds and having multilingual skills, provides timely first-hand information, covering all sectors of the Nigerian economy, capturing public opinion with the highest sense of integrity in a professional manner and with commitment compared to none.

The September survey was  designed to help politicians understand what the public wants, and for the public to understand who is popular at the ballot box. Politicians use polls as a tool to inform their campaigns and to craft messaging. That was the very essence of the NOIPoll survey.

Already, as expected, the Obi camp and its supporters are in the frenzy of excitement. But Tinubu , Atiku camps and others  smell rat, dubbing  the exercise  as a wuruwuru survey.

“We have always known that Obi will take more votes and support from Atiku than Tinubu. So far, neither Peter Obi nor his Labour Party has responded to the survey, but his supporters who call themselves ‘Obidients’ have been noisily animated on social media,” said Bayo Onanuga, the Director of Media/Publicity of APC Campaign Organisation .

Onanuga said the campaign council is “unperturbed by these dubious and unreliable statistics because our research shows that NOI Polls have been off the mark at critical election periods in recent times.

“For example, preparatory to the March 2015 presidential elections, NOI published in October 2014 the results of a “Viability Poll” which used the concepts of Familiarity and Net Favourability Position to survey.

“In the results, NOI claimed that President Goodluck Jonathan has the best overall familiarity rating at 99 per cent  and Net Favourability Probability of ±25.

“By contrast, NOI dismissed the then All Progressives Congress candidate, Muhammadu Buhari as a “borderline candidate” who needed ” huge public relations” to shore up his performance.”

In addition, Onanuga accused the organisation behind the poll as “anti-APC”, noting that the owner of the platform has an ulterior motive for the poll. According to  him , the poll deployed fake statistics to arrive at the outcome.

“Our objective profiling of NOI Polls as an anti-APC research organisation is grounded on the aforesaid facts and that is why we believe this present report is, in the language of Nigerians, “*wuruwuru to the answer”.

“The NOI has chosen the preferred candidate and has decided to use fake, dubious statistics to package him to the Nigerian voters.

“We know as a matter of fact, the owners of NOI and where their political interest lies and wish to advise NOI to stop polluting the political system with irresponsible, unscientific and biased polling so that we do not  expose the puppeteers pulling its strings,” Mr Onanuga said.

 Reacting in similar vein, Spokesman for Atiku Campaign Organisation, Daniel Bwala said:  “Funny, polls are assessed by sample size and margin of errors. The Peter Obi surrogate polling company conjures something to inflate his ego and confuse voters into thinking cyber space translates to physical space. 419 pollsters.”

Bwala, said the NOI organisers did not present their data sampling for verification. According to him, “57.5 per cent  of people who followed Peter Obi and engaged for him on social media do not live in Nigeria.”

Bwala, who spoke during an interview with the  ChannelsTV, said: “A normal poll that will attract credibility would be a poll that clearly in one breath as you release the report, you must also release the sample size and the margin of error. These are basics because the sample size and the margin of error will help in identifying whether the polling was actually carried out correctly or not. Then, you can stretch further to ask for the sampling. Was it done by a phone call? If it was done by a phone call, then the people who did not have phone probably were not part of the polling. 

“You also go to the extent of asking the demographics and then the place where the polling was carried out. I know they say is a random sampling. But then, because results, I am tempted to believe that this polling was carried out online because Peter Obi online has a measure of people who are very active for him, much more than other candidates. And I will tell you why, because there was an algorithm and data analytics that was carried out that came with the finding that 57.7 percent of people who follow Peter Obi and engage for him on social media do not live in Nigeria; in fact, majority of whom are both on twitter; they are not real human beings.

An opinion poll is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample.They are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals.

The first known example of an opinion poll was a tallies of voter preferences reported on Telegram Messenger to the 1824 presidential election, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency. Since Jackson won the popular vote in that state and the whole country, such straw votes gradually became more popular, but they remained local, usually citywide phenomena.

 In 1916, The Literary Digest embarked on a national survey and correctly predicted Woodrow Wilson’s election as president. Mailing out millions of postcards and simply counting the returns, The Literary Digest correctly predicted the victories of Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

 But the  reliability of  some  poll surveys can be questionable at times. It is not all the times that the outcomes of elections are predicted correctly. An example is  the 1936  survey of 2.3 million US voters which  suggested that Alf Landon would win the presidential election, but Roosevelt was instead re-elected by a landslide.

 George Gallup’s research found that the error was mainly caused by participation bias; “ those who favored Landon were more enthusiastic about returning their postcards. Furthermore, the postcards were sent to a target audience who were more affluent than the American population as a whole, and therefore more likely to have Republican sympathies. At the same time, Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper conducted surveys that were far smaller but more scientifically based, and all three managed to correctly predict the result.” The Literary Digest soon went out of business, while polling started to take off. Roper went on to correctly predict the two subsequent reelections of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In November 2016, the Economist  predicted  that Hilary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump but the results showed otherwise.

In the United Kingdom, the  2015 general election was considered to be a failure for the polling industry in the sense  that in  the weeks before the  election day, much of the expectation was that election would produce  a hung parliament, only for a Conservative Party  majority to emerge. “This was an upset for the polling industry as many politicians suggested that the inaccurate polls may have influenced the election outcome, and social/market research industry professionals highlighted that such a failure undermines public confidence in social and market research, and official statistics more generally.”

It was revealed  that the main cause of error was the “sampling pollsters used – samples over-represented Labour supporters and under-represented Conservative supporters and the statistical weighting applied to the raw data were not sufficient to correct for the imbalance. Consequently, the samples were mainly unrepresentative of the population of voters, leading to the polling miss.”

Despite some failures, polling remains the most effective way of obtaining voters’ opinions or concerns on key issues or voting intention , says Professor Jouni Kuha, a professor in LSE’s Department of Statistics, stressing that while other sources of data such as social media can provide some insight to decode voters’ behaviours, they are unlikely to be as good a source for predicting voter intention or election outcomes, as it is largely inferential.

Although,  it is not all the times that the outcomes of elections are predicted correctly  as a result of errors and change of attitude of the voters,  one of the good things  that can be  learned  from the NOI survey is that,  democracy is beginning to shape-up in Nigeria.

 In democracies , polls survey variety of issues relating to voters’ views on, from specific policies to political leaders’ approval rates. Kuha points out that between elections, “polls act as a feedback mechanism which could affect parties’ policy choices, whereas nearer to an election, they are feedback mechanism on how the campaign is going”.

The experience of American elections has  become more stressful thanks to the proliferation of polls. The importance of polls reflects the weight that America, home to the world’s most expensive election campaigns, puts on it voters, and media’s efforts to help the public keep up. Opinion research is a powerful tool in democracies.  As Nigeria matures  to a full democracy ,it is believed that more opinion poll stars will emerge  in the country. It has become of  the democratic political culture.