The Independent National Electoral Commission revealed that 42,211 applicants have registered on its online Continuous Voter Registration Portal barely 24 hours after its launch.
The portal went live on Monday this week as online registration began. The electoral body had stopped the repeated registration of voters in August 2018 before the previous election which was about 6 months ago.
Then, the totality of voters that were registered was roughly 84 million and this signifies that only about 42 percent of the country’s population were registered, voters. There were about 11 million unclaimed voters cards yet to be distributed before the Independent National Electoral Commission stopped the distributed weeks to the elections.
Mahmood Yakubu, the sitting INEC Chairman informed journalists in Abuja that the reason for creating the portal is to enable people who want to register to begin the registration process online and thereafter visit any INEC office to complete the registration from July 19, the same day that the physical registration is scheduled to commence.
He also said that due to the insecurity in the country, the portal was created for people to start doing their registration online before the 2,673 offices will resume. The portal also allows for those who are already registered to do things like transfers, correcting their personal information, and replacement of their Permanent voters’ cards online.
He hoped that the portal creation will help reduce overpopulation at the registration center especially because of the Covid 19 pandemic, it will make registration easier and make Nigerians enjoy registration easy registration.
However, the portal is a public service, so there is no fee attached, there is no cybercafé approved by INEC especially for the registration, all that is needed is a laptop or mobile phone with access to the internet.
Mahmood also stated that everything is in place for the registration and it will send 5,346 staff to the registration centers. He also mentioned a new registration machine called the INEC Voter enrollment device (IVED) which will be used instead of the old laptop direct data capture machine (DDCM).
He also said he was glad that their engineers designed the IVED device before it was fabricated abroad and he mentioned that the IVED is more efficient and mobile than the DDCM and can be used to accredit voters during elections. The INEC has changed 56,872 voting points and settlements into a polling unit to make it easier for people to vote in the upcoming elections.
