INEC says 40 percent of newly registered voters are students

Our reporter| The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Wednesday said students account for 40 percent of newly registered voters.

INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, who made the disclosure at the commission’s 2022 third quarterly meeting with political parties in Abuja, revealed that the total number of newly registered voters in Nigeria is 9,518,188, with youths leading the statistics.

“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 male (4.6 million or 49.18%) voters,” the INEC boss said.

“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.

But at the gathering on Wednesday, Yakubu, said the number of newly registered voters were filtered down after the commission identified millions of fake voters using its automated biometric identification system (ABIS).

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Mahmood also stated that the officials involved in invalid registrations have been identified and will face disciplinary actions.