Lagos – based pollster and CEO of Datavision Limited, a Gallup – style outfit, Mfon Eyoma, has said that polling has multiple benefits for our democracy especially in the developing nations like Nigeria.
Eyoma, a chartered accountant and ex – banker said in a statement issued yesterday that polling creates the avenue for public participation and a sense of involvement especially in governance when leveraged by honest politicians. He went on: “Polling focuses political discourse on a topical issue and helps politicians assess public opinion and guide policy. In advanced democracies, the ballot routinely incorporates polling for so much public opinion on other issues that it can be rightly considered a national or state referendum”.
According to Eyoma, “Besides its obvious application in the development of campaign strategy, polling is useful for formulating political ideology and public policy in a nascent democracy such as ours, and because they can be conducted for any purpose, they are a veritable tool not only in politics but also in business”.
He explained that when polls are conducted by a specialist the outcome is incontrovertible because it is backed by factual data. Therefore electoral violence arising from disputed results would be greatly reduced.
“Our electoral system is still manual, and our telephone and postal systems were too poor to support traditional research methods of telephone surveys and questionnaires until about 2002. Our manual electoral system was further compounded by widespread irregularities and outright fraud so that ballot papers were not only unreliable by inaccessible to psephologists for any meaningful post-election analysis”.
Mr. Eyoma, who promised to use Datavision to help enhance the integrity of the 2019 polls, explained the operations of his methods: “We have replicated the electoral system of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and designed the “Register of Voters” to capture details such as age, gender, religion, political affiliation, educational standard, occupation, state of origin, state of residence etc. Under the state of origin and state of residence we have further identified the voter by her Local Government Area, ward, state and federal constituencies and senatorial districts. Nigerians abroad will be able to select their country of residence from a dropdown and equally participate in the polls. When we analyze poll results by these fields, we’re able to predict a candidate’s chances at the General Elections with more reliable intelligence. All registration fields are non-mandatory but although non-registered or partially-registered users may also vote in the polls, we will know and disclose their numbers separately in our poll results”.