INEC says 40 percent of newly registered voters are students

Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says 40 percent of newly-registered voters are students.

INEC’s chairman, Mahmood Yakubu said the total number of newly-registered voters in Nigeria was 9,518,188.

Yakubu disclosed this on Wednesday at the commission’s 2022 third quarterly meeting with political parties in Abuja.

The INEC Chairman said, “In terms of demographic distribution, 7.2 million new voters or 76.5% are young people between 18-34 years, while there is a slightly higher number of females (4.8 million or 50.82%) than males (4.6 million or 49.18%) voters.

“In terms of occupation, 3.8 million (40.8%) are students.”

Earlier in September, the commission had said there was a recent surge in youth turnout for the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) exercise, leading to over two million new voters in one month.

However, on Wednesday, Yakubu said the number of newly-registered voters was filtered down after the commission identified millions of fake voters, using its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS).

Yakubu said, “At the end of the [CVR] exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters. All along, we have repeatedly assured Nigerians that our process of cleaning up the register is robust.

“After a rigorous cleaning-up of the data using the automated biometric identification system (ABIS), a total of 2,780,756 (22.6%) were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record, among them double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outrightly fake registrations that fail to meet our business rules.

“Consequently, the number of valid registrations (post-ABIS) is 9,518,188.”

The INEC Chairman further stated that officials involved in invalid registrations had been identified and would face disciplinary actions.