INEC declares full readiness for Anambra election

Professor Mahmood Yakubu, Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has said that the commission is ready for the Nov. 6 governorship election in Anambra State.

He said this at a meeting with the Joint National Assembly Committee INEC and Electoral Matters to engage with the commission over the forthcoming election in Abuja on Wednesday.

Yakubu said, “We have recovered from the series of attacks on our facilities and I am happy to say that we have deployed all the non-sensitive materials to all the local government areas.

“As far as INEC is concerned, we are good to go on Nov. 6.

“We have trained the requisite number of ad-hoc staff for the election and we have also mobilised members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) for efficient distribution of materials on election day,” he said.

On the distribution of Permanent Voter Cards in Anambra, he said, “We have a little over 81,000 valid registrants.

“With the suspension of the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) in Anambra that includes a little over 5,000 that applied for replacement of cards and intra-state and inter-state transfers.

“We are batching the cards. They will leave first thing tomorrow (Thursday) morning for Awka and all the new registrants will get their cards before the elections.

“This time around, with the help of technology, we were able to harvest the telephone numbers and email addresses of the registrants.

“So we will contact each and every one of them and tell them where to pick their cards. But the cards will be delivered to Awka on Thursday,” he said.

INEC was once accused of widespread electoral irregularities in the 2019 presidential elections including cases of ballot paper unavailability, smart card readers malfunctioning and large cancellation of valid votes. The main opposition People’s Democratic Party and its presidential candidate challenged the results of the election in court.