40% Of Newly Registered Voters Are Students – INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission says 40% of newly registered voters are students.

INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, on Wednesday also said 76.5 percent of newly registered voters are young people.

Yakubu spoke at Third Quarterly Meeting with political parties for the year 2022 held at the INEC Conference Room in Abuja.

According to him, 9,518,188 new voters have been added to the existing register of 84,004,084 voters and preliminary register of voters in Nigeria now stands at 93,522,272.

He said, “At the end of the exercise, 12,298,944 Nigerians successfully completed the registration as new voters. All along, we have repeatedly assured Nigerians that our process of cleaning up the register is robust.

“After a rigorous cleaning-up of the data using the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), a total of 2,780,756 (22.6%) were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record, among them double/multiple registrants, underaged persons and outright fake registrations that fail to meet our business rules.

“Consequently, the number of valid registrations (post-ABIS) is 9,518,188.

“In terms of demographic distribution, 7.2 million new voters or 76.5% are young people between 18-34 years while there is a slightly higher number of female (4.8 million or 50.82%) than male (4.6 million or 49.18%) voters.

“In terms of occupation, 3.8 million (40.8%) are students. Hard copies giving the full details of the distribution of the new voters are included in your folders for this meeting. The soft copy has already been uploaded to the Commission’s website and social media platforms.”