New Permanent Voter Cards will be made accessible by November, according to a statement published on Tuesday by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
At a National Endowment for Democracy event in Washington, DC, INEC Chairman Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu made this statement.
Yakubu said that the commission’s most recent Continuous Voters Registration exercise resulted in the removal of 2.7 million duplicate registrations.
He estimates that 50% of the new PVCs are prepared but have not yet been delivered to collection centers.
Additionally, he expressed worry about the nation’s increasing levels of insecurity, saying the Commission is “keeping its fingers crossed.”
“It is a perennial issue because, at the end of the day, it is not new but the dimension of the insecurity is new in the sense that in the past, it was localised or confined to a particular part of the country – the North-East but now, it is more widespread,” he said.
“We are keeping our eyes, particularly, on the North-West and the South-Eastern part of the country. Elections are conducted by human beings. We worry about the security of our officials, materials, and even the voters themselves. Without them, elections cannot be conducted. ”
The INEC chief, however, said they “have spoken to the security agencies and they have assured us that the situation will improve before the elections. So, fingers crossed.”
