The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has reportedly discovered 23 of its officials who engaged in fake voter registrations.
INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu disclosed this during the third quarterly meeting with political parties on Wednesday, October 26.
He noted that 2,780,756 (22.6%) of registrants are ineligible and invalid after the automated biometric identification system (ABIS) scrutinized the data.
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Mahmood said some of the invalidated registrations include multiple, underaged, and outrightly fake registrations that did not INEC’s operational rules.
Yakubu has stated that the INEC officers caught would undergo disciplinary measures.
“The commission deployed thousands of diligent staff for the CVR exercise and the vast majority of them discharged their duties conscientiously.
Unfortunately, a few of them did not. The fictitious registrations were carried out by some of our registration officers involved in the field exercise and could easily be traced.
Each registration machine is operated using an access code tied to a dedicated e-mail assigned to a staff. There is therefore an audit trail that gives the total number of persons registered by each official involved in the registration exercise. In some cases, some of them made as many as 40 attempts or more to register one fake voter.
As a result, the commission has so far identified 23 registration officers involved in this unethical conduct and disciplinary action has commenced. We shall continue to protect the integrity of our voters’ register.
It is pivotal to credible elections. It is also a national asset and easily the largest database of citizens in Africa and one of the largest in the world.
INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu
