By Ahmed Abubakar
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it is committed to ensuring that every properly registered voter gets his/her Permanent Voter Card (PVC) for the 2015 General Elections.
It also described as “completely false” the allegation that INEC had removed the records of 1.4 million persons from the Register of Voters compiled in 2011 in Lagos state.
In a statement, issued yesterday by the Chief Press Secretary to the Chairman, Kayode R. Idowu, the Commission said that at the end of the 2011 general registration exercise, the Commission announced a figure of 6.1 million registrants in Lagos state but that when that data was subjected to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) software, 82,892 multiple registrants were eliminated.
The Commission explained that there was also the technical challenge of loss of data and incomplete data affecting about one million records, mostly in 1,792 polling units that were identified and made public before the present distribution of PVCs.
The Commission further explained that a pre-acknowledged data loss and incomplete data of some registrants did not amount to a “conspiracy”, stressing that it was a back-end technical challenge that was far from sealing the fate of the affected registrants.
The statement assured that INEC was already putting in place measures to ensure redress and that the Commission had provided for eligible persons for whom PVCs could not be printed due to data loss or defective data to come out from Wednesday, November 12 to Monday, November 17th 2014 for their data to be recaptured during the Continuous Voter Registration exercise.
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