The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced that 7,746 deceased voters were removed from the national voter register in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory as of December 2022.
The Director of Voter Education and Publicity, Victoria Etta-Messi, disclosed this on Thursday.
“Seven thousand, seven hundred and forty-six deceased persons across the 36 states and the FCT were removed from the National Register of Voters as of December 2022,” she disclosed.
INEC revealed that a thorough cleaning of the voter register is usually done before every general election.
In its December 2024 post-general election evaluation, INEC highlighted issues with cleaning up the voter roll, despite advances in the voter registration procedure that added 12,298,944 new registrants.
One significant issue is the difficulty in eliminating deceased individuals due to gaps in official death records.
“Problems with official death records continue to make it very difficult for INEC to remove deceased registrants,” the commission noted.
The commission also found a problem with double or multiple registrations, which was resolved by using the Automated Biometric Identification System.
This method identified and eliminated 2,780,756 invalid registrations, representing 22.6% of all new registrants nationally.
INEC also expressed concerns about low voter turnout. The 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections saw a turnout of 27.5%, down from 35.6% in 2019.
Stakeholders in the review suggested that INEC strengthen its partnership with authorities such as the National Population Commission and the National Identity Management Commission to identify deceased voters.
“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,” INEC noted in its review.
