CHINEDU WOSU, YENAGOA
Ahead of the 2019 general election in the country, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has registered a total of 68,825 new voters in Bayelsa state during the ongoing Continuous Voters Registration exercise in the state.
The Administrative Secretary of INEC in the state, Mr. Clement Oha, revealed this on Wednesday during a news conference at the state headquarters of the commission in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital.
Oha, who scored the exercise in the state high, said that the turnout of prospective voters was impressive.
He said additional 10 centres were created in the state during the first phase of the exercise, noting that the state office had yet to know if more centres would be created in the second phase billed to commence on July 31,
2017.
The INEC boss said Southern Ijaw Local Government Area recorded the highest number of 14,110 registrants while Brass LGA was the least with 2,724.
He clarified that the registration was in three categories: those that clocked 18, those who registered before but couldn’t find their names in the register of voters and those who for unknown reasons could not register.
”The first phase of the national CVR ended on Thursday, July 20, 2017 and as at the final stage of the date, we had a total registered figure of 68,825 new registrants. We equally have those that transferred to Bayelsa State within and outside the state,” Oha said.
”The figure we have for those that transferred to Bayelsa State is about 1057. We are still undertaking consolidation and aggregation of data. By the time we finish the final collation of data, we will call for consolidation
from all the local government areas and all the machines that we used, because during the process, we encountered some challenges.
”We had issues with some machines not responding as optimally as we expected. But with the support of the INEC headquarters, we were able to surmount all the challenges. We deployed adequate number of machines to
cover all the centres in Bayelsa during the first phase.
”About the second phase, by the programme we got from Abuja, it is due to start on July 31, 2017. As I talk to you now, some of our staff from Abuja are at our ICT centre doing the consolidation and accreditation.
”By the time this is concluded, we are going to give you the final figure. It may go up or it may come down, but we don’t know because some of the machines had some challenges during the process and they have been working
on them in the past few days to recover some of the lost data. But as of today, what we have is 68,825.”
