2023: Not Everybody Who Registered For Voters Cards Will Be Able To Vote — INEC Announces

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that not everyone who registered for the Continuous Voter Registration, (CVR), would be entitled to the Permanent Voters Cards, (PVCs) to make them eligible to vote.

The electoral body’s National Commissioner for Information and Voters Education, Mr Festus Okoye, made the disclosure during an interview on Arise TV in Abuja.

Okoye who stated that the estimated number of voters for the 2023 general election were 95 million, said that those who got involved in double registration would be deleted from the commission’s data and subsequently denied PVC.

He went on to reveal that in the first and second quarters of the CVR over 46% of those who registered were removed from the commission data for multiple registrations.

He said: “Unfortunately, the CVR isn’t over. This is because we are going to subject the entire bio-data that was collected during the CVR exercise to a cleanup exercise, using our system to remove double and multiple registrants.

“As you are aware, when we cleaned up the data relating to first and second quarter of the registration process, we removed over 46% of double and multiple registrants .So, we are going to subject this particular data for the third and fourth quarter of this registration process to the same clean up.

“Thereafter, we are going to subject the entire data to display because section 19(1) of the Electoral Act 2022, makes it mandatory for the Commission to display the voters register, for claims and objections in the 774 local government areas of Nigeria and in the 8,809 registration areas. And by our own projection, if we consolidate the Voters register, and it comes to around 95millon registered voters, the implication is that we are going to print over twenty-eight million, five hundred thousand pages of documents to be displayed in these areas and thereafter, we are supposed to print the Permanent Voter Cards of all the legally qualified registrants and then take them back to the states, take them back to the local government areas, take them back to the registration areas for people to collect their PVCs and then we begin to audit our states and local government offices to make sure that all our non-sensitive materials are in place and then we begin to package our offices to get them ready for the 2023 general elections and continue with monitoring political parties campaigns, finances and the other activities in the timetable and schedule of activities.”