In a bid to address the cumbersome process of voter registration at the various centres in Nigeria ahead of the 2023 general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission has said part of the registration exercise will be done online while biometric data capturing would take place at designated centres.
The INEC National Commissioner, Information and Voter Education, Mr Festus Okoye, made this known. The new initiative is expected to reduce overcrowding at the registration centres.
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 those who are Internet savvy and have computers will start registration online and go to the registration centres for their fingerprint and face capturing. What we have done as a commission is to prioritise some of the cogent issues that we need to address. What we have decided is that the expansion of access to polling units is very urgent and will fundamentally affect the issue of continuous voter registration. We have pointed out that we have a total of 119, 973 polling units and these polling units were established in 1996, which is almost 25 years ago. As of the 2019 election, we had a total of 84, 040, 80 registered voters. But in 25 years, while the number of registered voters kept increasing, the polling units available to voters remained static. So, what we are doing is to expand access to the polling units, remove some of the voting points available as of today, and move them to the people that need them. We are almost concluding with consultations and when we are done in the next week or two, we will move to the various places and begin the implementation. We will consult community leaders on the best places to put these polling units. The polling units that are in the houses of political chieftains that are in shrines or in the forests will be moved to schools or other public places. With the new enrolment device, we want to deploy and the number of people, we can conclude this process within a period of one year. I can’t see what will make us more than a year to register less than 20 million voters,”