Key Points

• The unclean voter register raises concerns about transparency.

• INEC warns delays could affect election credibility.

• Stakeholders demand stronger scrutiny of the unclean voter register.

The electoral commission in Nigeria said that a lot of people signed up to vote in the most recent round, but they also said that the country’s voter register is still full of old and wrong entries, which raises new concerns before the next elections.

Joash Amupitan, the chairman of INEC, said on Thursday that the first phase of the Continuous Voter Registration exercise, which ran from August 18 to December 10, saw 2,685,725 people sign up. The majority of the sign-ups, 1.57 million, came through the online portal. The rest, 1.1 million, were recorded at physical centres. Osun, Kaduna, Plateau, Imo, Borno, and Lagos had the most people take part.

More people are worried about the dirty voter list

Amupitan said that the turnout showed that people were still interested in the process, but he stressed that the final voter roll’s credibility depends on what happens next. The claims-and-objections window, which opens on December 15, lets people check or dispute entries before the register is finalised.

He said that not enough people taking part at this stage has led to mistakes not being fixed in the past. The chairman said that Nigeria’s voter list hasn’t been fully cleaned up since 2011, so there are still thousands of dead people on it as active voters. He gave an example from Anambra where a well-known person who died 15 years ago was still on the list.

Claims window goes after dirty voter rolls

INEC is asking civil society groups to get people ready for the verification phase. Amupitan said, “Some of the problems we have come from low participation.” “The claims window was made to make sure the register is correct and trustworthy.”

Phase Two of the CVR starts on January 5 and will move registration centres closer to wards to make it easier for people to get there. This is because complaints that long distances made it hard for people to vote in some states.

Demand for better systems and cleaner records

The chairman also talked about vote-buying cases from recent elections that worried him. He said that INEC has written to the police and anti-corruption agencies to ask for updates on the investigations. He also said that the commission’s technology, like BVAS and the results-viewing portal, keeps having problems with the network that INEC can’t fix.

Amupitan said that Nigeria’s elections would be better if there were dedicated communication infrastructure, but that is not yet possible.