40 percent of newly registered voters are students, says INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says students account for the 40 percent of newly registered voters.

The total number of newly registered voters in Nigeria is 9,518,188, according to Mahmood Yakubu, INEC’s chairman.

Speaking on Wednesday at the commission’s 2022 third quarterly meeting with political parties in Abuja, Yakubu said youths lead 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 female (4.8 million or 50.82%) than male (4.6 million or 49.18%) voters,” Yakubu 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 speaking 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.”

The INEC chairman also said officials involved in invalid registrations have been identified and will face disciplinary actions.