INEC To Sanction 23 Officials Over Irregularities, Says 93.5m Nigerians Eligible For 2023 Polls

The Independent National Election Commission (INEC) on Wednesday confirmed that only 93.5 million Nigerians are so far eligible to participate in the forthcoming 2023 general elections.

The electoral body said the reported figure of eligible voters was arrived at after adding 9,518,188 new voters to the existing register of 84,004,084 voters.

Naija News reports that the update was given today by INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu in Abuja during the third quarterly meeting with political parties.

The commission’s boss noted that 12.29 million Nigerians completed their registrations as new voters in the just concluded Continuous Voter Registration CVR.

Yakubu noted that the commission has just had an extensive data clean-up using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) and that over 2.78 million were identified and removed as ineligible registrants.

From the exercise, the INEC boss said 23 of the commission’s registration officers were caught in attempts to engage in multiple registrations of Nigerians.

“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. The 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,” Mahmood noted.

He assured that the erring officials would be sanctioned, adding that the commission would not tolerate any act of irregularities.

He said: “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. We shall continue to protect the integrity of our voters’ registers. 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.”

Naija News understands that Yakubu’s disclosures came as the Inter-Party Advisory Council IPAC passed a vote of confidence on him for his innovations to reshape the electoral process.

Speaking further on the success recorded so far ahead of the 2023 elections, Mahmood maintained that the commission would not back down on its move to deploy BVAS and IReV in the forthcoming polls.

He said only last week, INEC commenced training master trainers on election technology to ensure a seamless process.

From Thursday, INEC will commence the same training at zonal levels and subsequently train all its ad hoc staff for the 176,846 polling units nationwide.

“On this note, let me reassure Nigerians that there is no going back on the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System 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.

“There will be no Incident Form that enables ineligible persons to vote using other people’s Permanent Voters Cards PVCs during elections. We are committed to ensuring that the 2023 General Election is transparent and credible, reflecting the will of the Nigerian people”, Mahmood said.

Valid/Invalid Registrations

Giving a further update on voter records, Yakubu disclosed in Abuja that at the end of the recent CVR, 12,298,944 Nigerians completed the registration as new voters and 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 those whose registrations were invalidated were double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outrightly fake registrations that failed to meet INEC’s business rules.

He said: “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.”

This article was originally published on Naija News

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