The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC has announced that 7,746 deceased voters were expunged from the national voter register across the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory as of December 2022. Director of Voter Education and Publicity, Victoria Etta-Messi, made this known yesterday to newsmen during a stakeholders meeting.
According to her, “Seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-six decreased persons across the 36 states and the FCT were removed from the National Register of voters as of December 2022”.
It is an INEC tradition that, a thorough cleaning of the voter register is usually conducted before every cycle of general election, she said.
It added that in its 2023 post-general election review last December 2024, the commission highlighted its major challenges with cleaning up the voter register, regardless of improvements in the voter registration process that added 12,298,944 new registrants.
According to the INEC, one major issue that stands out is the difficulty in removing deceased persons due to gaps in official death records with our population commission record.
“Problems with official death records continue to make it very difficult for INEC to remove deceased registrants,” the commission noted.
Double or multiple registrations, which was addressed by deploying the Automated Biometric Identification System is another problem that has being a bend it its operation the commission added.
However, with the deployment of the biometric identifier, the process flagged and removed 2,780,756 cases of invalid registrations, representing 22.6 per cent of the total new registrants nationwide.
INEC further expressed concerns about declining voter turnout. The 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections recorded a turnout of 27.5 percent, down from 35.6 per cent in 2019.
Although, some stakeholders have criticised this partly due to an inflated voter register and called for more rigorous efforts to clean it.
Meanwhile, Stakeholders during the review recommended that INEC should strengthen collaboration with agencies such as the National Population Commission and the National Identity Management Commission to identify deceased voters.
Others also suggested that those who did not voted consecutively for three cycle of election should be suspend until they are revalidate their registration before they should be allow to participate.
“One suggestion from this review was to strengthen collaboration with other agencies such as NIMC and NPC to identify deceased persons in the register and remove them. In addition, the commission could suspend individuals who have not voted in the past three elections from the register and request them to revalidate their registration,” INEC noted in its review.
