Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Monday said that over Over 7m voter cards not yet collected – INEC million Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) had yet to be collected nationwide by their owners.
Mr Mohammed Haruna, INEC National Commissioner in charge of North Central, made this known in Ilorin, Kwara State capital, while speaking with journalists.
Haruna was in Ilorin to assess the progress of Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) in the state.
The national commissioner also disclosed that 239,000 PVCs had yet to be collected in Kwara State.
He said that all PVCs of voters who registered between 2017 and now would be ready for collection in April.
He said that the commission would do everything to ensure that all the PVCs were collected by their owners before the 2019 general elections.
“Before the commencement of 2019 general elections, all the PVC will be ready; our problem is collection because we do not have facilities for distribution.
“We have close to eight million uncollected PVCs across the country and it will not be nice to disenfranchise these numbers of voters,” Haruna added.
The national commissioner said INEC had put some measures in place to ensure that registered voters collected their PVCs.
Haruna said registration of voters would be rotated among the wards in the state during which ready PVCs would be distributed to the owners.
He appealed to those that had registered since the commencement of the exercise to check with their registration centers for collection of the cards.
According to him, INEC had procured and distributed new Direct Data Capturing machines (DDC) to all the 36 states of the federation and Abuja to ease registration of voters.
NAN
