INEC, however, urged owners of remaining voters’ cards to pick up their PVCs from the commission’s LGA offices
By Kehinde Okeowo
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed that 68.3 per cent of the 184,438 new voters’ cards issued during the recent Continuous Voter Registration exercise in Edo State were collected ahead of the September 21 governorship election in the state.
This was disclosed in a statement issued on Tuesday in Abuja by INEC’s National Commissioner and Chairman of Information and Voter Education Committee, Sam Olumekun.
According to him, 125,928 of the 184,438 newly printed Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVCs) in the state were picked up in five days.
Olumekun said, ”This marks the highest collection rate recorded by INEC since the introduction of CVR for off-cycle governorship elections in 2015.
”The collection, which took place across all 192 wards in Edo State between Aug. 22 and Aug, 26 was achieved through a carefully coordinated effort by INEC.
”The commission is pleased to announce the conclusion of the collection at Ward level. Learning from the lessons of the previous collection of PVCs, the commission has carefully packaged all the PVCs by Poling Units, Wards and LGAs.
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“We also produced the collection register, providing details of the voters whose cards were ready for collection and uploaded same to our website.”
He went on to say a detailed breakdown of the collection by LGAs had been uploaded to INEC website and social media platforms for public information.
He further added that collection of PVCs would resume in all INEC offices in the 18 LGAs in Edo State from Wednesday to September 8.
Olumekun also appealed to voters who are yet to pick up their PVCs to do so at various INEC offices in the state.
”Let me reiterate INEC’s policy that no cards should be collected by proxy”, he said, adding that detailed information on the locations of INEC LGAs offices was already available on the commission’s website.