The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has taken 7,746 deceased voters off Nigeria’s national voter list across all states and the Federal Capital Territory as of December 2022.
Victoria Etta-Messi, who leads voter education and publicity at INEC, shared this information on Thursday: “Seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-six decreased persons across the 36 states and the FCT were removed from the National Register of voters as of December 2022.”
INEC typically does a thorough cleanup of voter records before each general election. In their December 2024 review of the 2023 elections, they discussed challenges in keeping the voter list accurate, even though they successfully added over 12 million new voters.
One big challenge is removing deceased voters because Nigeria lacks complete death records. As INEC stated: “Problems with official death records continue to make it very difficult for INEC to remove deceased registrants.”
Another issue was duplicate registrations. INEC used a system called Automated Biometric Identification to find and remove nearly 2.8 million invalid registrations, which was about 22.6% of all new registrants.
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INEC also noticed fewer people are voting. In the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections, only 27.5% of registered voters participated, down from 35.6% in 2019. Some experts think this might be because the voter list includes people who have passed away or moved.
To fix these problems, experts have suggested that INEC work more closely with other government agencies like the National Population Commission and the National Identity Management Commission.
As INEC noted in its review: “One suggestion from this review was to strengthen collaboration with other agencies such as NIMC and NPC to identify deceased persons in the register and remove them. In addition, the commission could suspend individuals who have not voted in the past three elections from the register and request them to revalidate their registration
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