Oknewsonline.com brings you...15 things you need to know about the Continuous. INEC Voters Registration (CVR)

Oknewsonline.com brings you...

15 things you need to know about the Continuous. INEC Voters Registration (CVR)

 

1. The CVR is for Nigerians who clocked 18 years after the last time exercise was conducted in 2018 and those who never registered but are above the constitutionally allowed age grade. This means that as long as one is 18 years old or more and has not registered before, he/she is eligible for this CVR.

2. At least 5,346 INEC staff are expected to be deployed in the 2,673 centres nationwide for this exercise. According to the INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, this arrangement is to buy “enough time for the Commission to reach all the nooks and crannies of the country.” He assured that no eligible Nigerian will be disenfranchised.”

3. The exercise will go on continuously over a period of at least one year and last till the third quarter of 2022, both online and across the commission’s provided centres.

4. INEC said it is targeting at least 20 million new voters to its existing voters.

5. INEC launched a dedicated portal for online registration last week for the exercise. This is unlike the previous years where prospective voters queued in various centres to register and obtain their voter’s cards.

6. The newly launched portal will enable Nigerians to commence the registration process online by filling the forms, other documents, then make an appointment on the web portal for a date and time to visit an INEC State or Local Government Area (LGA) office to give their fingerprints and complete the registration.

7. To allay the fear of those who are not digitally inclined, physically disable in a way or more, or people residing in urban and suburban areas without access to the internet, the commission also has made provision for 2,673 centres where citizens can register physically without any form of payment, nationwide.

8. Against the former laptop-based old Direct Data Capture Machine (DDCM), the 2021 CVR exercise will be conducted using a new registration machine called the INEC Voter Enrolment Device (IVED).

The device, according to the INEC chairman, was designed and built by the commission’s engineers before it was fabricated abroad. It could be deployed for other activities such as accreditation of voters during elections. It is more mobile and accessible than the previous device.

9. In addition, those who are already registered as voters can carry out all the other activities such as transfers of voting location from one place to another, correction of personal details and replacement of damaged or defaced Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVCs) online.

10. Registered voters, who have had any issue during accreditation for any past election with their Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVC) and their fingerprints can use this window (2021 CVR) to make those corrections.

11. Initially slated for the first quarter of 2020, the CVR exercise could not hold due to the scary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

12. The last exercise was conducted in 2018, just before the 2019 General Elections. At the close of that exercise, Mr Yakubu confirmed in January 2019 that officially, 84,004,084 Nigerians had been duly registered for the 2019 General Elections.

13. In 2018, the commission registered over 12 million new voters, a leap from the almost 70 million voters were accounted for ahead of the 2011 General Elections.

14. The commission, for the first time, began the implementation of the registration of voters on a continuous basis as provided in the Electoral Act, in April 2017.

15. If INEC attains its projected 20 million new voters in addition to the 2019 existing 84 million voters, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, will have not less than 124 million voting population for the 2023 General Elections.