Peter Obi wins NigerianEye Presidential Opinion Poll

 

The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) has been projected to win the coming presidential election in Nigeria, according to an opinion poll conducted by NigerianEye.com

The poll, which lasted from February 17th to February 22nd and was engaged by thousands of NigerianEye.com visitors and across our social media pages. The respondents rated Peter Obi higher than other front runners, including APC's Bola Ahmed Tinubu's, PDP’s Atiku Abubakar and NNPP’s Rabiu Kwankwaso.

Labour Party's Peter Obi won with 76 % of participants proposing to vote for him if the presidential election were to be conducted today, APC's Bola Tinubu fell in second place. with 14% of total votes,  PDP's Atiku Abubakar was third with 6% and Rabiu Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with about 4% of participants proposing to vote for him.

The NigerianEye Presidential Opinion Poll had no room for manipulation, and the transparency of the polling was tested by participants who could see the results real time as they voted.

The online survey was also conducted via a secure web platform that prevented multiple voting.

Labour Party's Peter Obi have now won more than six opinion polls conducted by different reputable platforms like Anap Foundation, Bloomberg, Stears etc.

How reliable are online polls?

In another opinion poll conducted by NigerianEye.com before the presidential elections in 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari who was then a presidential candidate under APC also won by defeating PDP's Goodluck Jonathan, when Nigerians took to the polls few weeks after we released results of our 2015 poll, Buhari was also the preferred candidate, and he became the Nigerian president in 2015

Polls have thus become indispensable to finding out what people think and how they behave. All polls are surveys based on samples drawn from parent populations. A poll's purpose is to make accurate inferences about that population from what is directly learned about the sample through questions the sampled persons answer.

Online polls are not totally representative and do not always represent public opinion.

“It categorically does not represent public opinion – at best, it may coincide with it,” the BBC says in its Guideline on Opinion Polls, Surveys, Questionnaires, Votes and Straw Polls.

Furthermore, The results of online polls are the opinion of the online population only and they are not a true representation of the majority of the people without internet.

Why opinion polls are very important?

Despite all it's shortcomings and criticisms, online polling is still a very useful tool of analysis and a major source of public opinion.

The same way that a chef can judge the sweetness of a large pot of soup by tasting just one spoonful, providing that the soup has been well stirred, so that the spoonful is properly "representative", one spoonful is sufficient to know the taste of the soup.

Online opinion polls operate on the same principle: achieving representative samples is broadly akin to stirring the soup.

Also a chef could drink a large amount from the top of the soup, and still obtain a misleading view if some of the ingredients have sunk to the bottom. Just as the trick in checking soup is to stir well, rather than to drink lots, and by stirring well here, we have been able to sample the results of different Nigerians.

The essence of a poll is to secure a representative sample, rather than a vast one, so consequently the representative sample will be the pointer to the vast majority.

In general conclusion, while online opinion polls may not be perfect, but they are a very important way of measuring public opinion.