The North-West and South-West account for the majority of the 93.4 million eligible voters, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) distribution of the final voter list on Wednesday.
Mahmood Yakubu, the commission’s chairman, presented the voter list during a meeting with political party leaders at the INEC headquarters in Abuja and stated that there were 37,060,399 young people who had registered to vote.
To allow eligible voters to validate their information and for Nigerians to denounce ineligible people who were listed in the preliminary voter registration for the 774 local government areas; the commission published it on its website in November 2022.
Yakubu said the commission received more than 53,000 objections to the register; after which the ineligible voters were removed.
He stated, “After the cleaning-up of the data from the last continuous voter registration exercise, 9,518,188 new voters were added to the previous register, resulting in the preliminary register of 93,522,272; which was presented to Nigerians for claims and objections as required by law.
“At the end of the period for claims and objections by citizens; the INEC received 53,264 objections from Nigerians to the prevalence of ineligible persons on the register by age, citizenship, or death. These names have been verified and removed from the register.”
According to the figures released by the commission; the North-West geopolitical zone has the highest number of registered voters with 22,255,562.
As of the 2019 elections, the North-West had 20.15m voters. However, the latest report released by INEC showed that over 2m new voters registered during the recently concluded continuous voter registration.
The South-West, which in 2019 had 16,292,212 registered voters, now has 17,958,966; having added 1,666,754 new registered voters.
The North-Central, which had 13,366,070 registered voters in 2019, now has 15,363,731.
The electoral body figures also show that the South-South has 14,440,714 registered voters. The region boasted 12,841,279 registered voters in 2019.
On the other hand, the North-East currently has 12,542,429 up from 11,289, 293 voters it had in 2019; while the South-East has 10,907,606 up from 10,057,130 registered voters it had in 2019.
By gender, men surprisingly dominate the voter register at 49,054,162 (52.5 per cent); while the figure of female voters stands at 44,414,846 (47.5 per cent).
