The Independent National Electoral Commission has disclosed plans to have an online voter registration portal voter and will capture biometric data at designated centres.

INEC National Commissioner, Information and Voter Education, Festus Okoye, told Punch on Monday that the new development would address overcrowding at registration centres and ease the cumbersome registration process.

“We won’t require everyone to go to registration centres to go register. The new registrants will start their registration online and only go to the registration centres for the purpose of capturing fingerprints and faces. So, that lessens the period that people will spend at registration centres.”

Speaking on the delay in the commencement of the suspended continuous voter registration scheduled for the first quarter of 2021, Mr Okoye said the delay was due to ongoing consultations over new polling units.

According to him, the new polling units’ creation has become necessary as the country’s 119,973 polling units is no more enough. 

He further disclosed that the continuous voter registration would kick-start as soon as some of the newly created 57,000 voting points in the last election get converted into full polling units.

He explained, “We have pointed out that we have a total of 119,973 polling units, and these polling units were established in 1996, that is almost 25 years ago. As of the 2019 election, we had a total of 84,040,80 registered voters. 

“But in 25 years, while the number of registered voters kept increasing, the polling units available to voters remained static.”