From David Onuoja, Abuja
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has revealed that, it delisted about 7,746 deceased persons from the Voters’ Register in the Country.
Victoria Etta-Messi, who is the Director of Voter’s Education and Publicity, revealed this saying, the names were removed from the national voters register in 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja as of December, 2022.
According to her, “a thorough cleaning of the voter register is usually done before every general election.
On its 2023 post-general election review in December 2024, it highlighted challenges with cleaning up the voter register, despite improvements in the voter registration process that added 12,298,944 new registrants.
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“Problems with official death records continue to make it very difficult for INEC to remove deceased registrants,” the commission noted.
The commission also identified the problem of double or multiple registrations, which was addressed by deploying the Automated Biometric Identification System”.
This process flagged and removed 2,780,756 cases of invalid registrations, representing 22.6 per cent of all new registrants nationwide.
It further noted 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.
Some stakeholders attributed this decline partly to an inflated voter register and called for more rigorous efforts to clean it.
It added that, Stakeholders at 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.
There were also calls to suspend individuals who have not voted in the past three elections and require them to revalidate their registration.
“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”, it averred.
