Voters' registration: North-West, South-West lead with 41m voters

Voters’ registration: North-West, South-West lead with 41m voters

A total of 96,303,016 eligible voters have registered to vote in the 2023 general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said.

The latest registration figures show that North-West has 22,672,373 while the South-West now has 18,332,191 voters.

As at the close of registration on Sunday, both North-West and South-West have 41,004,564 registered voters.

This was made known via the latest voter statistics released by INEC on Monday.

The electoral umpire noted that 12.2 million voters registered in the nationwide Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) before it ended on Sunday, July 31.

However, the latest report released by INEC showed that the North-West, which is made up of seven states, Sokoto, Kano, Kebbi, Katsina, Zamfara, Kaduna, and Jigawa has the highest number of voters ahead of the 2023 general election with 22,672,373 prospective voters.

According to INEC, the South-West geopolitical zone, which comprises Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, and Ekiti, has 18,332,191 voters.

The North-Central which is made up of Nasarawa, Kogi, Benue, Niger, Kwara, and Plateau, occupied the third position with 15,680,438 voters.

South-South, which comprises Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Cross River, Bayelsa, Edo, and Delta, occupied the fourth position with 15,299,374 voters.

The North-East, which is made up of Yobe, Borno, Taraba, Adamawa, Bauchi, and Gombe, is fifth on the table with 12,820,363 voters, while and South-East, which comprises Ebonyi, Enugu, Abia, Anambra, and Imo, has 11,498,277.

A breakdown of the completed registration by states showed that Lagos has the highest number of registrants that completed their registration with 585,629 registrants, followed by Kano with 569,103, and Delta with 523,517.

Ekiti has the lowest number of people who completed registration with 124,844, followed by Yobe with 152,414, FCT with 211,341, and Imo with 213, 270.

A breakdown of INEC’s report also showed that 8,784,677 of the registrants that completed their registrations were youths, 2,430,709 middle-aged, 956,017 elderly, 127,541 old persons, while 87,083 were Persons With Disabilities (PWDs).

The data also showed that 6,074,078 of the new registrants were males while 6,224,866 were females.

The Star

Segun Ojo