The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Professor Mahmoud Yakubu, said that 2.7 million double registrations were deleted from the recent Continuous Voters Registration exercise. This was said at a National Endowment for Democracy event in Washington D.C., in the United States of America. He added that about 50% of the new PVCs are ready, but yet to be distributed to collection centres.
Yakubu said that they had communicated with the security agencies regarding the safety of their materials, officials, and the voters, on election day. The security agencies assured them that the situation will be better before the election period. In the previous month, the INEC boss stated at a forum with members of the Nigeria Guild of Editors, that the commission was making preparations for about 95 million voters in the election, next year. He explained that they had 84 million voters, and about 12 million have been newly registered. This sums up the estimated 95 million voters.
The newly registered voters were not yet added to the register then because, according to him, they were still cleaning up the register. Mahmoud explained that the law required them to clean up the data before adding new data. After the clean up, the register would be thrown open for Nigerians to further scrutinize according to Section 19, subsection 1 of the Electoral Act.
