The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Chairman says it has commence investigation of its field registration officers involved in the fictitious voters registrations during the continuous registration of voters by using an access code tied to a dedicated e-mail assigned to a staff and promised to sanction those found culpable of the crime.
The Chairman of the commission, Mahmood Yakubu made this known at the third quarterly meeting held with political parties in Abuja.
Yakubu also revealed that Nigerian youths between the ages of 18-34 have the highest numbers of the new registered voters with 7.2million out of the 9.5million at 76.5%.
Yakubu said the commission will print 9,352,228 pages of the register and the hard copy will be displayed for each of the 8,809 Registration Area Wards and 774 Local Government Areas nationwide while the entire register will be published on INEC’s website for claims and objections as required by law. The display of the physical register will take place at the designated centers from Saturday 12th – Friday 25th November 2022 including procedures for filing claims and objections.
Also read: INEC weeds out 2.7m double registrations
The commission again reassured Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, for voter accreditation, transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal, IReV, in real-time on Election Day as the Incident Form that enables ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards, PVCs, during elections will no longer be acceptable in achieving transparency and credibile polls.
At the end of the exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians have successfully completed the registration as new voters but after the cleaning up exercise of the data using the automated biometric identification system, a total of over 2.7Million representing 22.6% were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record.
The 9.5million new voters have been added to the existing register of 84,004,084 voters as the PrelimInary register of voters in Nigeria now stands at 93.5 million.
Editor: Ena Agbanoma
