Key questions this article answers:
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What are the likely reasons for the 2023 presidential election’s low voter turnout?
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How do our faulty population numbers influence voter turnout?
25 million Nigerians. 27% of the electorate.
Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Election was determined by voter turnout. Many polls had placed the Labour Party candidate (Peter Obi) as the frontrunner in the run-up to the highly anticipated elections. But even then, Stears understood turnout would be key. So, after building the first-of-its-kind election prediction model, we analysed multiple turnout scenarios to give more accurate predictions.
Most memorably, we predicted a Bola Ahmed Tinubu win in a low-turnout scenario (although most media channels preferred to focus on our high-turnout prediction). The estimated turnout in our low turnout scenario: 29%.
Fast forward to Wednesday, 1st March, and the real clincher in Nigeria’s election story was the clear emergence of voter turnout as the antagonist on the
