WED, 26 OCT, 2022-theGBJournal| The Independent National Electoral Commission has caught 23 registration officers attempting to register fake names as voters.
The Commission says it has commenced disciplinary action against them.
INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu made the disclosure today at the third quarterly meeting with political parties in 2022, held at the INEC Conference room, Abuja.
The Chairman said in his address to the party officials that the Commission deployed thousands of diligent staff for the CVR exercise and the vast majority of them discharged their duties conscientiously. ‘’Unfortunately, a few of them did not.’’
‘’Fictitious registrations were carried out by some of our Registration Officers involved in the field exercise and could easily be traced. Each registration machine is operated using an access code tied to a dedicated e-mail assigned to a staff. There is therefore an audit trail that gives the total number of persons registered by each official involved in the registration exercise.’’
The INEC boss said, ‘’in some case, some of them made as many as 40 attempts or more to register one fake voter. We shall continue to protect the integrity of our voters’ register. It is pivotal to credible elections. It is also a national asset and easily the largest database of citizens in Africa and one of the largest in the world.’’
Meanwhile, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters, according to Prof. Yakubu. The number is derived after the ‘rigorous’ clean-up of the voter register using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS).
Besides, a total of 2,780,756 (22.6%) were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record, among them double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outrightly fake registrations that fail to meet INEC’s business rules. Consequently, the number of valid registrations (post-ABIS) is 9,518,188.
In terms of demographic distribution, 7.2 million new voters or 76.5% are young people between 18-34 years while there is a slightly higher number of female (4.8 million or 50.82%) than male (4.6 million or 49.18%) voters.
In terms of occupation, 3.8 million (40.8%) are students. Hard copies giving the full details of the distribution of the new voters are included in your folders for this meeting.
INEC said the soft copy has already been uploaded to the Commission’s website and social media platforms.
According to the INEC boss, the 9,518,188 new voters have been added to the existing register of 84,004,084 voters. The PRELIMINARY register of voters in Nigeria now stands at 93,522,272.
‘’It is preliminary because Section 19(1) and (2) of the Electoral Act 2022 requires the Commission to display the hard copies of the register of voters for each Registration Area (Ward) and Local Government Area (and simultaneously publish the entire register on the Commission’s website) for a period of two weeks for scrutiny, claims and objections by citizens not later than 90 days to a General Election.’’
Accordingly, in the next few days, the Chairman said, the Commission will print 9,352,228 pages of the register. The hard copy will be displayed for each of the 8,809 Registration Areas (Wards) and 774 Local Government Areas nationwide while the entire register will be published on our 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 25thNovember 2022. Further details, including the procedure for filing claims and objections, will be released by the Commission next week.
I would like to appeal to all Nigerians to seize the opportunity of the display to scrutinize the list and help us to clean it up further so that the final register of voters for the 2023 General Election can be compiled and published.’’
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