Over 7,000 deceased persons have been deleted from the voters’ registrar by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Victoria Etta-Messi, the director of voter education and publicity for the commission said the individuals were removed from the national register across the 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory in December 2022.
According to Etta-Messi, INEC regularly conducts cleaning of the national registrar before every election to ensure that those on the register are eligible to vote.
She said, “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.”
Etta-Messi further stated that in its post-2023 election review, there were a total of 12,298,944 new registrants following improved registration process adopted by the commission.
She added, “One major issue is the difficulty in removing deceased persons due to gaps in official death records.
“Problems with official death records continue to make it very difficult for INEC to remove deceased registrants,” Etta-Messi noted.