Ninety-five million voters are expected to determine President Muhammadu Buhari’s successor in office in the 2023 poll, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said.
Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC Chairman, said this at a function organised by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in Washington DC, U.S.
Yakubu said this in a keynote address titled “Nigeria 2023: ensuring credible, peaceful and inclusive elections”, made available to the media in Abuja on Thursday.
He described the 2023 general election as significant to Nigeria.
“The election is significant because the incumbent President is not eligible to run, this being his second and final term.
“There are 18 political parties in the race to produce the next President to be elected by 95 million voters. We had over 84 million registered voters in 2019.
“But with last Continuous Voter Registration(CVR), we are going to add at least 10 million Nigerians and that will take the Register of Voters to 95 million,” Yakubu said.
He said that election was significant as 95 million Nigerians were expected to vote in 176, 846 polling units.
“Each time Nigeria goes to the poll, it is like the whole of West Africa voting.
“In West Africa, there are 15 countries including Nigeria. But the total number of registered voters in the 14 countries combined is 73 million.
“In Nigeria, it’s going to be 95 million. So, there will be 22 million more voters in Nigeria than the whole of West Africa put together,” Yakubu said.
The chairman said that INEC has learnt a lot of lessons from the 2015 and 2019 general election as well as 103 off cycle election and bye-election conducted after the 2019 general election.
He added that a lot of innovations have been introduced to increase transparency and ensure credibility of the country’s electoral process.
“The new Electoral Act with its many progressive provisions has provided legal backing to the innovations.
“These innovations are now provided for and protected by law, especially those leveraging on technology to improve voter registration, voter accreditation, result management and the promotion of inclusivity for marginalised persons such as women, youths and persons with disability,” he said.
Yakubu said that the introduction of online voter registration was part of the innovations, saying it was very helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said that the online registration was done alongside physical registration from June 2021 to June 2022 when that option lasted and 12, 298, 944 voters completed their registration.
“This is more than the entire voter population in the Republic of Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cape Verde. We are such a huge country of great potentials,” he said.
Yakubu said that INEC has completed the cleaning up of the data of newly registered voters using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) that combine the fingerprint and the facial authentication of registered voters.
He said that those who registered twice and those who were underage or have no reason to register as provided by law have been weeded out.
“The exercise was completed a few days ago. We have not even shared the information with Nigerians, but we have 2.7 million invalid registrants and they have been weeded out.
“We will continue to take steps necessary to protect the integrity of the Register of Voters because it is fundamental to the conduct of elections. There can’t be credible elections without a credible register of voters,” he said.
Yakubu said that Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVC) would be available for new registrants by Novembe.
“We are looking at early to the middle of the month to make the cards available.
“We have already printed over 50 percent of the cards but we haven’t delivered them to the states yet.
“As we clean the data, we also print the car
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