2023: Northwest, Southwest lead in voter registration

A total of 96,303,016 eligible voters have registered to vote in next year’s general election, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

It is made up of seven states: Sokoto, Kano, Kebbi, Katsina, Zamfara, Kaduna and Jigawa.

The region is being trailed by the Southwest, which has 18,332,191 voters. The zone is made of the six states of Lagos, Oyo, Ondo, Osun and Ekiti.

Prospective voters from the two regions account for 41.7 per cent of the total number of registered voters as gleaned from the INEC website by The Nation yesterday.

The electoral body had registered 84,004,084 voters for the 2019 polls. Thus, there are new 12,298,932 registered voters.

Northcentral is third with 15,680,438, followed by Southsouth with 15,299,374; Northeast, 12,820,363 and Southeast, 11,498,277.

INEC shut its registration portal on Sunday, thus bringing the exercise to a halt for now.

A notice on the website yesterday read: “The CVR exercise has been suspended. Access to log-in to check the status of your completed applications will soon be restored.”

The deadline for the exercise was first fixed for June 30 before it was moved to July 31.

A state-by-state breakdown of the new registration figure of 12,013,068 shows that Kano, one of the seven Northwest states, topped the table with 569,103 prospective voters.

Lagos State is second with 585,629.

From the statistics, 8,854,566 of the 12,013,068 new voters registered physically while 3,444,378 did theirs online.

The data also shows that 6,074,078 of the new registrants are males and 6,224,866 are females.