Independent National Electoral Commission INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu has reassured Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voter accreditation.
Yakubu stated this at the Quarterly Consultative Meeting with Leaders of Political Parties held today 26th October 2022 in Abuja, Nigeria’s Capital.
“There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in real-time on Election Day. There will be no Incident Form that enables ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) during elections,” INEC Chairman declared.
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Transparent Election
He restated the Commission’s commitment to ensuring that the 2023 General Election is transparent, credible and reflects the will of the Nigerian people.
“The critical foundation for credible election is the voters’ register. You may recall that the CVR which started on 28th June 2021 lasted for thirteen consecutive months until its suspension on 31st July 2022”.
“During that period, the Commission gave Nigerians regular weekly update showing the progress of the exercise nationwide, including analysis of the distribution of voters by age, occupation, gender and disability for our planning purposes and for public information”.
“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,” he explained.
Yakubu further explained that 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” he noted.
Let me once again reassure Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of BVAS for voter accreditation.
There is no going back on the transmission of results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in real-time on Election Day.Prof. Mahmood Yakubu
INEC Chairman pic.twitter.com/LfGGQccwsy— INEC Nigeria (@inecnigeria) October 26, 2022
Demographic Distribution
The INEC Chairman also explained that 7.2 million new voters or 76.5% are young people btw 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
“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 Commission will print 9,352,228 pages of the register” he stated.
He stated that the hard copy of register 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 the Commission’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. 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,” he said.
The Chairman vowed that the Commission “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”.
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