Yiaga Africa, a civil society organisation, has given eligible voters the responsibility of making sure that their registration is current on the Independent National Electoral Commission's (INEC) internet platform for Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) (INEC).
On Thursday, Yiaga Africa and Daily Trust, one of its partners, hosted a Twitter Spaces session where the group's Director of Programs, Cynthia Mbamalu, made the request.
The advertisements, which began on Thursday, would run every day from 8 to 9 p.m. until the general elections.
The beginning of the distribution of Permanent Voters' Cards (PVCs) to registrants at the 8,809 electoral wards across Nigeria was announced by INEC earlier in the day.
Speaking, Mbamalu said, “INEC deregistered multiple registrants or invalid registration last year, 2022, while about 2 million plus were cleaned up from the register and however, most of these individuals do not know that their names are not in the register.
“So, there’s a likelihood that some individuals who may have approached INEC for their PVCs are told their PVCs were not ready. Maybe one of those whose details were cleaned off from the register.
“Now what this means is that… There are two scenarios here. If there were some voters, what they wanted to achieve was to transfer their registration from their previous location to a new place of residence or to update their voter registration. And also those who wanted to replace their permanent voter's card and because of poor communication, rather than transferring, updating or replacing, conducted rather than did a new registration.
“Now what INEC did was to clean out the new registration. So what this means is that for these voters, there is the likelihood that their PVCs will be in their original place post-registration. So, if they are registered in 2018 before and let’s say they registered in local government A and were hoping to move to local government B where they did their new registration, it means they would not find their PVCs in local government B but in local government A because the information written in the register is their previous registration data.
“So, this is also a possible likelihood and is important for voters experiencing some of these challenges to also confirm and be sure that their registration has been updated on the INEC CVR portal, that way you will also know if you are going to the right place to seek for your PVC.”