By Nefishetu Yakubu
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Edo Office, on Friday said 850 polling units were affected by the recent migration of voters across polling units in the state.
The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Obo Efanga, made this known while addressing newsmen on the commission’s preparedness ahead of the general elections in Benin.
Efanga also disclosed that the total number of registered voters in Edo was 2,501,081.
He noted that 1,996,088 PVCs, representing 79.8 per cent were collected while 504,993 were still uncollected.
He explained that the bulk of the uncollected cards were for people who registered between 2010 and 2011.
Speaking further, Efanga noted that Edo had 4,519 polling units out of which migration of voters took place in 850 polling units.
“As you all know, we are expanding the numbers of polling units across the country and the total number of polling units in Edo is 4,519.
“However, going into the elections, we tried to limit the number of voters in a polling unit to a manageable figure so that on election day, you do not have crowd in a particular polling unit.
“So, we thought that we should find a way to evenly distribute the figures so that people can move to nearby polling units through the process of migration of voters.
“This is because some have large numbers of voters up to 1000 or more, while others have very little like 20 or 50. We simply moved voters from the large to the smaller polling units,” he said.
According to him, we have printed out the register of those polling units affected by migration and given to our electoral officers to display in their local government areas.
“So people can go and check and know where their polling units will be on election day.
“We still have some polling units because of their peculiarities; we could not find nearby polling unit to move people to, so we did not touch such polling units.
“So, INEC headquarters decided to deploy more than one BVAS machines to those large polling units.
“In Edo, about 96 polling units will have more than one BVAS machines.
“I also need to stress that on no occasion should anybody be given a ballot paper to vote if you have not been accredited with the BVAS, no matter how large the polling unit is,” he added.
(NAN)
