Voters’ Register: INEC May Prosecute 54 Staff Involved in 1.6 million Invalid Registrations

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

The chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Amupitan (SAN), on Monday disclosed that 54 staff members of the commission in 10 states were involved in the invalid registrations discovered in the 2025/2026 Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) exercise.

During its clean-up of the voters’ register, the electoral body said it deleted about 1,609,553 records from the national register of voters.

From the above figures, 873 records belonged to verified deceased persons, which were removed as a separate category.

Speaking with newsmen in Abuja yesterday, Mr Amupitan promised that the identified INEC employees would face disciplinary action and possible prosecution.

He said the commission harvested 11,088,238 records from the three phases of the 2025/2026 CVR, and the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) initially flagged 1,545,052 of these for examination.

But the INEC chair clarified that “A flagged record is not necessarily an invalid registration: automated screening identifies matters requiring review, while authorised adjudication determines the outcome.”

He noted that the scale of the removals was considered significant enough to warrant an examination of how it occurred and those responsible for it, adding that the technical assessment examined suspected multiple registrations, unusual registration patterns, substituted photographs and irregularities in registration transactions, and found that some registration personnel acted deliberately.

“The commission found instances in which certain registration personnel deliberately circumvented established registration procedures and misused provisions intended for exceptional registration circumstances, including for persons with disabilities,” he said.

“Fifty-four persons cutting across 10 states have been identified as complicit, and necessary disciplinary action will be taken against them, including possible prosecution,” he said, noting that to prevent a recurrence, INEC is strengthening its registration controls with enhanced biometric capture, authentication and verification safeguards.

However, the chairman stressed that the clean-up does not resolve the wider problem, saying most of the duplicate names and pictures circulating on social media relate to the old register covering 2011 to 2023.

“Cleaning the register of only the 2025/2026 Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) exercise alone will not solve the problem identified,” he said, warning that the final list would still carry over duplications from 2011 to 2023.

But he assured Nigerians that Election Day safeguards would guard against multiple voting, stating that under the Standard Operating Procedures for Presiding Officers, and with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), every voter must be physically present at their designated polling unit and pass biometric authentication by fingerprint or facial recognition.