The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it has delisted 2,780,756 registrants from the millions of new voters who registered during the just concluded Continuous Voters Registration (CVR).
This was disclosed by the commission’s chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, 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.
However, Mr Yakubu, at the meeting, confirmed that a total of 2,780,756 (22.6%) of the 12 million registrants have been declared invalid due to infractions such as double registration, and underage registrants, among others.
“At the end of the exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters. All along, we have repeatedly assured Nigerians that our process of cleaning up the register is robust.
“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,” the INEC boss said.
Mr Yakubu said the noticeable infractions were “carried out by some of our Registration Officers involved in the field exercise and could easily be traced.”
He added: “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.”
Credit: premiumtimesng.com
