The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it will remove double registrations, dead persons and other ineligible names from the voters register ahead of the 2027 General Election, and will ask Nigerians to help identify underage registrants during the claims and objections period.

This was disclosed by the National Commissioner and Chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee (IVEC), Mohammed Kudu Haruna, in an exclusive interview with Nigerian Tribune.

Haruna said the commission stopped the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) to enable it to carry out backend processes, including the cleanup of the register through the Automatic Biometric Identification System (ABIS).

“We have to confirm first if there are underage. That is why we have to stop the CVR. You know some people were saying we must extend it. But there are backend need that we need to do, including this cleanup,” he said. When asked to provide an update on voters register cleanup and speak about what the Commission was doing about questions around the underage in the register,” he said.

“You know we have ABIS where we clean up if somebody has registered more than once. Of course, we will publish the list. When we publish the list, we expect members of the public to make claims and raise objections.”

He explained that the public will have about one to two weeks to scrutinise the register after publication.

“For instance, if you are aware that someone is underage and is on our voters register, you draw our attention to it so that we clean it or a situation where someone is dead. This takes a week or two so that people can respond, raise objections and make claims,” Haruna stated.

“Underage are not the only category of people that should not be on the voters register. Foreigners too should not be on the voters register and somebody who has registered more than once. In the process of that cleanup, that is where we raised those questions,” he added.

Voters register cleanup ongoing

The INEC Commissioner said the commission is still running the ABIS to detect multiple registrations before publishing the register.

“We are still doing ABIS, that is Automatic Biometric Identification System. When we complete that, then we will publish the list of voters register. That is, after we have removed those who have registered more than once – double registration or multiple registration – we now publish it. We are still in the process of that,” he said when asked to speak about the period when the commission would publish the list of voters register,” he said.

INEC to set up voting camps for IDPs

On eligible voters displaced by insecurity in parts of the North, Haruna said INEC has a policy to ensure Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are not disenfranchised.

“As for the IDPs, we have an IDP policy. We have a whole policy on internally displaced persons. We go to their camp. For instance, if the whole community has moved to the camp, we go there,” he said.

“If they are not close to the election, we can create one so that those who are living in houses of other families can go to that camp and vote,” he added.

The INEC official said the commission remains committed to delivering a credible register for the 2027 polls by cleaning it of multiple registrations and other ineligible entries before it is made public on Tuesday, 18 August, 2026.

Haruna projected that Nigeria’s voter register will cross the 100 million mark ahead of the 2027 general elections during a joint implementation meeting of the Departments of Voter Education and Publicity and Gender and Inclusivity.

He said the last register stood at over 93 million voters, and the recently concluded Continuous Voter Registration exercise is expected to push the total above 100 million. (Nigerian Tribune)