THE Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said over 12 million new applicants have completed their voter registration.
Youths make up 71 per cent of the 12 million fresh applicants for Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) in the Continuous Voter Registration exercise (CVR) which started in June 2021 and ended on July 31.
According to the latest voter statistics released by the Commission, 12.2 million persons registered in the Continuous Voter Registration, bringing the total number of registered voters in the country to 96.2 million.
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The North-West geopolitical zone, which comprises Sokoto, Zamfara, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi and Jigawa, with a total of 22.67 million registered voters, has the highest number of registered voters.
As of the 2019 elections, the North-West had 20.15 million voters. However, the latest report released by INEC showed that 2.5 million new voters registered during the recently concluded continuous voter registration, bringing the total number of registered voters in the zone to 22.67 million.
The South-West, which earlier had 16.29 million registered voters, now has 18.3 million, having added 2, 039, 982 new registered voters. The zone comprises Lagos, Ogun, Osun, Oyo, Ekiti and Ondo.
In third position is the South-South which comprises Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Cross River, Bayelsa, Edo and Delta states. The number of registered voters in the zone has risen from 12.8 million to 15.2 million.
The North-Central which is made up of Nasarawa, Kogi, Benue, Niger, Kwara and Plateau now has 14.1 million voters while the North-East which is made up of Yobe, Borno, Taraba, Adamawa, Bauchi and Gombe added 1.5 million new voters to reach 12.8 million registered voters.
The South-East, which is the smallest geopolitical zone, and consists of five states – Ebonyi, Enugu, Abia, Anambra and Imo – now has 11.49 million voters while the number of registered voters in the Federal Capital Territory has increased from 1.3 million to 1.5 million.
Lagos maintained its position as the state with the highest number of registered voters, increasing its figure from 6.5 million to 7.1 million. Kano State also maintained its second position, adding 569, 103 new voters to increase its number to 6.02 million.
Kaduna State now has 4.4 million registered voters while Rivers State has now overtaken Katsina as the fourth largest state in terms of voters. While Rivers now has 3.68 million voters, Katsina has 3.57 million.
Some other states with a sizeable number of registered voters are Delta (3.3 million) and Oyo (3.3 million).
Also, Ekiti retained its position as the state with the lowest number of registered voters despite rising from 909, 967 registered voters to 1, 034, 911.
Youths make up 71 per cent of new voters. Also, women outnumber men.
Of the 12.2 million newly registered voters, about 8.7 million are between the ages of 18 and 34 while about 2.4 million are between ages 35 and 49. Those between ages 50 and 69 are about 856, 017 while about 127, 541 are over 70.
The statistics also showed that more women registered during the latest CVR than men. While 6,224,866 are women, 6,074,078 are men.
According to INEC, youths aged between 18 and 35 constitute the highest number of completed registrations with a total of 8,784,677, while by occupation, students account for the greater number of registrants with 4,501,595.
The commission’s data also shows that by gender distribution, the number of female registrants sums up to 6,224,866, while that of males is 6,074,078.
Nurudeen Akewushola is an investigative reporter and fact-checker with The ICIR. He believes courageous in-depth investigative reporting is the key to social justice, accountability and good governance in society. You can reach him via [email protected] and @NurudeenAkewus1 on Twitter.