The Independent National Electoral Commission says 125,928 of the 184,438 newly printed Permanent Voters’ Cards were collected before Edo’s September 21 governorship election.

INEC spokesman Sam Olumekun said this in a statement on Tuesday.

The PVC collection, he said, represented 68.3 per cent of the 184,438 new cards issued during the recent Continuous Voter Registration exercise.

“This marks the highest collection rate recorded by INEC since the introduction of CVR for off-cycle governorship elections in 2015. The collection, which took place across all 192 wards in Edo state between August 22 and August 26, was achieved through a carefully coordinated effort by INEC.

“The commission is pleased to announce the conclusion of the collection at Ward level. Learning from the lessons of the previous collection of PVCs, the commission has carefully packaged all the PVCs by polling units, wards and LGAs.

“We also produced the collection register, providing details of the voters whose cards were ready for collection and uploaded same to our website,” he said

Mr Olumekun said a detailed breakdown of the LGAs’ collection had been uploaded to the INEC website and social media platforms for public information.

He added that the collection would resume in all INEC offices in the 18 LGAs in Edo from Wednesday to September 8.

Mr Olumekun appealed to the remaining voters to pick up their PVCs from INEC LGA offices.

”Let me reiterate INEC’s policy that no cards should be collected by proxy,” he stated, adding that detailed information on the locations of INEC LGAs offices was already available on the commission’s website.

(NAN)