By Eric Elezuo
Rate Your Leader, a new Nigeria democracy app, has identified Nasarawa, Taraba and Ondo states as the states where the heaviest electoral battle for the 2019 Presidential election slated for February 16 would be fought.
After thorough research, the makers of the app, revealed that the states will decide the presidential contest, which is seen in many quarters as a two-horse race between the incumbent, President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
The research further revealed that elections in the FCT, could be decided by the choices of as few as 5398 voters while identifying Nassarawa, Taraba and Ondo as the key electoral battlegrounds in the presidential election. The states, according to the research, are currently too close to call, with the smallest number of voters needed to change the votes they cast in 2015 to deliver a completely different result.
Speaking on the findings, Rate Your Leader founder and Nigerian tech entrepreneur, Joel Poopola, said that the areas under review are some of the states where winners could be decided by just few voters from the country’s huge population.
“The nature of the electoral map in Nigeria is that in places like Delta and Katsina States, people go to the polls knowing that realistically, their votes will make very little difference – but in areas like Abuja, Nassawara and Ondo, the entire election could be decided by just a few voters from a population of nearly 200 million. Polling in Nigeria remains in its infancy; as polls at this stage in 2015 were predicting that the presidential contest was either too close to call or a foregone conclusion, when, in fact, President Buhari won comfortably, but not emphatically,” he said.
He continued: “At Rate Your Leader, our goal is to reconnect people and politics by using technology, but as a proud Nigerian, I also want our electors to go to the polls with the levels of political knowledge and engagement that electors in similar large democracies take for granted.”
Rate Your Leader is a global online platform which helps politicians engage only with voters in their constituencies in an abuse-proof way. The technology allows elected leaders to truly understand what matters most to the people who elect them while allowing local people to identify and contact their representatives at the touch of a button, direct from their phones or tablets.
The app, which also allows people to check to see if they are registered to vote and identify their elected representatives at the touch of a button, is free to download from the App store and other app marketplaces.
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