INEC Reveals Plans for Online Voter Registration, Targets 16 million Nigerians
- INEC has said that the future election in Nigeria would be better than the previous ones
- Festus Okoye, the INEC national commissioner, information and voter education, made this known on Monday, March 22
- Okoye spoke on the need to convert some of the voting points to full polling units to ease the process of voting
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The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said part of the registration exercise would be done online while biometric data capturing would take place at designated centres.
The electoral umpire said it would address the cumbersome process of voter registration at the various centres in Nigeria ahead of the 2023 general elections.
Legit.ng gathered that the new initiative is expected to reduce overcrowding at the registration centres.
Source: Original
The INEC national commissioner, information and voter education, Festus Okoye, said this an exclusive chat with The Punch newspaper while reacting to questions on the modalities for voter registration.
He said:
“We won’t require everyone to go to registration centres to go register. The new registrants will start their registration online and only go to the registration centres for the purpose of capturing fingerprints and faces. So, that lessens the period that people will spend at registration centres.
“It is only those who cannot do the online registration or don’t have the capacity to do so, that will go to the polling unit to complete the entire process but for those who are Internet savvy and have computers will start registration online and go to the registration centres for their fingerprint and face capturing.”
The INEC commissioner noted that Nigeria’s 119,973 polling units established in 1996 had become grossly inadequate, hence the creation of over 57,000 voting points in the last elections.
He noted that there was a need to convert some of the voting points to full polling units to ease the process of voting.
Okoye noted that once this was done, the continuous voter registration would be able to take off.
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Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that the INEC on Saturday, March 20, suspended the Ekiti East bye-election indefinitely following the violence that characterised it.
It was reported that INEC's leadership made this drastic decision known through Festus Okoye, its national commissioner and chairman of the information and voter education committee.
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Wale Akinola is a passionate journalist and researcher. He works as a senior political/current affairs editor at Legit.ng. He holds both B. A and Master’s degree in Communications and Language Arts from the University of Ibadan. He also holds a Diploma Certificate in Peace Journalism. He has over 15 years of work experience in both print and online media. He derives joy in keeping the public abreast of current happenings locally and internationally through his writings.
Source: Legit.ng
