INEC explains why there won’t be extension of voters registration

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has explained why the commission would not extend the ongoing continuous voter’s registration (CVR) exercise, scheduled to end on July 31, 2022.

INEC National Commissioner in charge of Voter Education and Publicity, Barr. Festus Okoye, while interacting with journalists on Saturday in Awka, Anambra State, ruled out the possibility of extending the CVR beyond Sunday.

Okoye disclosed that the commission would stop CVR and focus on other constitutional responsibilities like scrutinising the voters’ registers to clean up possible incidents of double registration, printing permanent voters cards (PVC), and displaying voters registers across polling units, among others.

According to Okoye, those who registered or carried out transfers between January and June 2022 will get their PVC in October, while those who enrolled in July will receive theirs by November 2022.

Speaking on Anambra State’s performance, he stated that a total of 276,767 registrants completed their registration processes as of July 25, 2022.

“We deployed a total of 110 INEC development devices to Anambra. 10 malfunctioned. 6 were repaired by our in house engineers and redeployed back to fields. As you know, the exercise was slowed down at some places in the South East for security purposes. And we devices mitigating measure to fortify it” he said

“In Anambra State, we trained some of our staff to assist in carrying out the exercise. By training some of our staff, we isolated those for transfer, replacement, and others. We trained our staff to assist in rendering the various services. We extracted clear protocol on how to carry out voters transfer.

“Few weeks we isolated places to carry out intervention; we took machines to markets, churches, NUJ, NYSC orientation camp and other places due to large concentration. This helped to mitigate the surging crowd. For complaints over performance of our staff, we developed a compliant desk for people to voice out their complaints. Over 50 complaints were received and treated. We carried intervention at 82 locations,” he stated.