Edo Governorship: INEC Holds Mock Accreditation As PVC Collection Continues

By Ayodele Oni

The Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC) has announced that collection of voters card by those that newly registered in Edo state will continue till 7th September at all the 192 Wards in Edo State.

National Commissioner & Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Sam Olumekun who disclosed this in a press statement stated that the exercise was previously slated to end on Tuesday.

He added that “Permanent Voters’ Cards (PVCs) from the recent Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) in Edo State would be available for collection at two levels.”

Olumekun said the learning from the lessons of previous collection of PVCs, the Commission has carefully packaged all the PVCs by Poling 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.

“We contacted them using the addresses provided at the time of registration. As a result, out of the 184,438 new PVCs available, 125,928 cards were collected by voters representing 68.3% of the total.

“This is the highest percentage of PVCs collected in five days since the Commission introduced the CVR ahead of off-cycle governorship elections in 2015.

“A detailed breakdown of the collection by LGAs has been uploaded to our website and social media platforms for public information.

“Meanwhile, the collection will resume in our 18 LGA offices in Edo State from tomorrow Wednesday 28th August 2024 and end on Sunday 8th September 2024.”

Olumekun appealed to the remaining voters to pick up their PVCs in person from the LGA offices, reiterating the policy that no cards will be collected by proxy.

In another development, INEC said that it will hold mock accreditation of voters ahead of Edo State governorship election scheduled to hold on September 21, 2024.

INEC National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Sam Olumekun, in a statement Tuesday, revealed that the mock accreditation would hold on September 10, 2024.

He said: “In continuation of preparations for the Edo State governorship election holding on Saturday, 21st September, 2024, the commission is test running the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and result upload to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal for the election using live voters in select locations in the state.

“For this purpose, the commission has designated 12 polling units across six local government areas (LGAs) covering the three senatorial districts of the state as centres for the mock accreditation.”