NOI poll: We’ve been using same methodology since 2015, Anap Foundation replies critics

Anap Foundation, a non-profit organisation, says the recently released NOI polls on the 2023 presidential election followed the same methodology as its previous polls.

On Wednesday, the organisation released the December edition of the 2023 presidential pre-election opinion poll.

The results projected that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) is ahead among the four leading candidates for the 2023 presidential election.

The three other candidates are Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP).

The result showed that 23 percent of respondents proposed to vote for Obi if the election was held at the time of the poll, while Tinubu got 13 percent.

Atiku came third with 10 percent, while Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with two percent.

The organisation, however, said the poll is inconclusive considering that the combination of undecided voters and those who refused to disclose their preferences is enough to change the outcome.

The poll result has since generated varied reactions.

In a statement on Thursday, Festus Keyamo, spokesperson of the APC presidential campaign council, said there were many unanswered questions regarding the format for conducting the poll, and alleged that the outcome was “deliberately skewed”.

Responding to critics in a tweet on Friday, Anap Foundation said the poll was carried out with the same methodology deployed for previous polls including the 2015 and 2019 elections. 

The short answer to those criticizing our Polls is that @NOIPolls used the exact same methodology for our 2022 Presidential & Governorship Polls (Ekiti, Kwara, Lagos, Abia, Kano & Rivers) as they used in 2015 & 2019. See link to their methodology statement https://t.co/znqCuxs65c

Advertisement

— Anap Foundation (@anapfoundation) December 23, 2022

In September, a similar NOI poll placed Obi as the leading candidate for the 2023 presidential race, with 21 percent of votes.

THE METHODOLOGY 

In a statement released in September, Anap had said the stratified random sampling design is usually adopted for the selection of respondents for polling.

“NOIPolls adopts a proportionate, stratified random sampling design for polling. Respondents 18+ years are selected from our database of over 70 million phone-owning Nigerians,” the foundation had said.

“Stratification is set on several key demographics such as age (18+), gender, geo-political zones, states, and local government areas (LGAs) to make sure the final sample is representative of the actual population. The gender and the geo-political zone demographic distribution of the respondents are in the same proportion with the 2006 National Population Census.”

PREVIOUS ELECTION POLLS 

In 2015, the presidential pre-election poll commissioned by Anap Foundation projected that Muhammadu Buhari of the APC would win the presidential election.

In 2019, a similar NOI poll placed Buhari as the leading candidate for the 2019 presidential election ahead of Atiku Abubakar, candidate of the PDP.