INEC removes 2.78m registrants over infractions, voters now 93.5m

The Independent National Electoral Commission has delisted 2,780,756 persons from the millions of new voters who registered during the just concluded Continuous Voters Registration.

The commission’s chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, stated this on Wednesday at a quarterly meeting with leaders of political parties in Abuja.

A total of 12,298,944 registrants were initially declared to have successfully completed the exercise which lasted between June 2021 and July 2022.

Yakubu, at the meeting, however, said 2,780,756 (22.6%) of the 12 million registrants have been declared invalid due to infractions such as double and underage registration, among others.

He said, “At the end of the exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters.

“After a rigorous cleaning-up of the data using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), 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 our business rules. Consequently, the number of valid registrations (post-ABIS) is 9,518,188.”

Yakubu explained that noticeable infractions were “carried out by some of our Registration Officers involved in the field exercise.”

He said, “Each registration machine is operated using an access code tied to a dedicated email assigned to a staff member. There is therefore an audit trail that gives the total number of persons registered by each official involved in the registration exercise.

“In some cases, some of them made as many as 40 attempts or more to register one fake voter. As a result, the Commission has so far identified 23 Registration Officers involved in this unethical conduct and disciplinary action has commenced.”

Mr Yakubu said with the delisting of the 2.78 million registrants from the voter register, there are now 93,522,272 registered voters in the country.

He, however, said the new total figure may still change in the coming days after the register is subjected to public scrutiny at the ward and local government levels across the country in accordance with the provisions of the Electoral Act

“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,” the INEC boss said.

Yakubu said 76.5 percent (7.2 million) of the 9.5 million new registered voters in the country are young people between 18 and 34 years old.

He said while the female gender accounts for 4.8 million which is 50.82 per cent. the males account for only 4.6 million of the new voters