The Independent National Electoral Commission said it would announce the total number of uncollected permanent voter cards after the end of the distribution exercise, before the general elections.
Ahead of the February 25 polls, INEC had fixed December 12 to January 22 for the collection of PVCs nationwide.
The Cable reported that the chief press secretary to the INEC chairman, Rotimi Oyekanmi, said the commission is distributing PVCs from 2019 and from the last registration exercise in 2022.
He said, “At the moment, we have two sets of uncollected PVCs. The first is the 2019 set, that is, the uncollected PVCs as of 11th February 2019. At that time, we had 84,004,084 registered voters. A total of 72,775,502 or 86.63 percent collected their PVCs, while 11,228,582 did not.
“So, we had a carry-over of 11,228,582 uncollected PVCs from 2019.
“We now have the second set of voters that registered between June 2021 and July 2022. As of 1st August 2022 when the continuous voter registration was suspended, we had 12,298,944 completed registrations.
“But remember, we had to clean up the voters’ register to delete the second registration by those who had previously registered (those who registered twice) while retaining their first registration; and those who were not supposed to be there by virtue of being foreigners or due to death. So, we produced a preliminary register of voters and displayed it for Claims and Objections all over the country for about two weeks.
“All the PVCs for the 2021/2022 set have been printed and are now being made available for collection through our state offices across the country. We are happy that Nigerians are coming out to collect their PVCs and we will continue to improve our services where they encounter any challenge.
“The total number of uncollected PVCs nationwide will be announced by the INEC chairman after the deadline for collection of PVCs, just before the 2023 general election.”