INEC identifies 23 officials involved in fake voter registration

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it has identified 23 personnel who carried out fake voter registrations.

Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chairman, said this on Wednesday at the third quarterly meeting with political parties.

Following the suspension of continuous voter registration (CVR) on July 31, INEC put the total number of completed registrations at 12,298,944.

Speaking at the meeting, the INEC chairman said after a rigorous clean-up of the data using the automated biometric identification system (ABIS), 2,780,756 (22.6%) of the registrants were identified as ineligible and invalidated.

He said among those invalidated are double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outrightly fake registrations that failed to meet the commission’s business rules.

Yakubu added that the fake registrations were carried out by some of the INEC officers.

“The commission deployed thousands of diligent staff for the CVR exercise and the vast majority of them discharged their duties conscientiously,” he said.

“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.”