INEC says some won’t get PVC out of 95m registered voters
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
A total 95 million voters have registered for the 2023 election, says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), but clarifies that only those who registered just once in the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) exercise will make the cut.
The names of those who did multiple registrations in the third and fourth quarters of the CRV which ended on 31 July will be deleted from the database and they cannot vote because they will not get Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs).
INEC Information and Voter Education Commissioner Festus Okoye made the clarification when he gave the figures on Arise TV in Abuja.
He said INEC now has 95 million voters on its database but just as 46 per cent of those who registered more than once in the first and second quarters of CVR were deleted, those who did in the third and fourth quarters will also be deleted.
“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 clean up exercise, using our system to remove double and multiple registrants,” Okoye explained.
“As you are aware, when we cleaned up the data relating to the first and second quarters of the registration process, we removed over 46 per cent of double and multiple registrants.
“We are going to subject this particular data for the third and fourth quarters of this registration process to the same clean up.”
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Huge task of registration consolidation
“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, Okoyo added, per Nigerian Tribune.
“And by our own projection, if we consolidate the voters’ register, and it comes to around 95 million registered voters, the implication is that we are going to print over 28,500,000 pages of documents to be displayed in these areas.
“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.
“Then we begin to audit our states and local government offices to make sure that all our non-sensitive materials are in place.
“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.”
Timelines don’t permit another PVC registration extension
Okoye explained that it is no longer possible to extend registration for PVC because it will clash with other schedules in the run up to the vote.
“If every individual who is legally qualified to register registers, we projected that we should give enough time to people. That was why we spaced out the voter registration process over the period of 13 months to enable all registrants, eligible to come to our local government and state offices and register.
“Unfortunately, the deluge, the surge started building up when it was just two weeks to the close of registration exercise. Based on the surge and the deluge, we extended the voter registration exercise by another one month.
“Not only that, we also deployed additional staff to all the registration areas, we deployed additional INEC machines to all the registration areas. We increased the period for registration from 9 in the morning to 5pm and also included Saturdays and Sundays.
“But, unfortunately, we have to bring this process to an end because we can’t go on ad infinitum.
“Our electoral process is constitutionally and legally circumscribed and if we continue with the CVR exercise ad infinitum, it will do damage to our timelines and schedules of activities for the 2023 general elections.”
