The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has announced the commencement of disciplinary action against 23 of its officers for their involvement in manipulating Continuous Voters’ Registration.

INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, on Wednesday also said 76.5 percent of voters who registered newly were youths.

Yakubu spoke at the Third Quarterly Meeting with political parties for the year 2022 held at the INEC Conference Room in Abuja.

According to him, 9,518,188 new voters have been added to the existing register of 84,004,084 voters and preliminary register of voters in Nigeria now stands at 93,522,272.

He said, “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 case, 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.”

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