The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has said the ongoing Continuous Voter Registration exercise will end on Sunday, July 26, 2026. It has, therefore, called on prospective registrants who are yet to do so to take advantage of the remaining hours before the window closes.
This comes amid calls by some opposition political parties for an extension over concerns that millions of citizens could be excluded from the 2027 general elections, it was reported.
But the INEC National Commissioner, Mohammed Haruna, told Punch in an interview that the commission would not extend the deadline, stressing that the registration exercise had to close to enable the electoral body to begin cleaning the data already collected.
Haruna said the commission’s Information Technology team and the Voter Registration Department would begin processing the data as soon as the registration window closed.
INEC will roll out its Automated Biometric Identification System to identify and purge multiple registrations before the provisional voters’ register is displayed for public scrutiny,” he said. He added that the final number of newly registered voters would be known only after the biometric verification and the claims and objections process.
“Voter registration closes at midnight on Sunday,” he said. There won’t be an extension. “We have so many things we need to do at the back end. If we don’t draw a line we can’t make a clean copy of what’s been posted.
“We have an automatic biometric system that will check if someone has registered more than once. They will issue a register of claims and objections. That is, if anybody thinks that a name should not be on the register, or if he has some claims, for instance, that his name has been omitted or some of his details are wrong.
Read Also: Enenche: Nigerian soldiers should not earn less than N250,000 monthly
“So it’s after everything that’s been done that we will have a final figure, which we’ll now put on top of the existing 93 million or so. And that is the voters register. “We have to give a copy to every political party before the election.”
Haruna also dismissed concerns that the closure could exclude a number of Nigerians from the 2027 electoral process, saying INEC could only account for eligible citizens who showed up for registration.
He said the commission had recorded registrations through its online platform, physical registration centres and INEC offices across the 774 local government areas.
The Chief Press Secretary to the INEC Chairman, Dayo Oketola, also told the publication that the decision to end the Continuous Voter Registration exercise was in line with constitutional and legal provisions and necessary to pave way for preparations ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Oketola added that the registration portal had not been under any unusual pressure, saying the system was built to accommodate the number of applicants for the exercise.
Dismissing fears that the suspension of the registration exercise would disenfranchise eligible Nigerians, Oketola said the commission embarked on massive nationwide voter education and awareness campaigns to encourage participation.
Oketola said the registration exercise must be stopped in order to enable the commission to conclude several critical activities before the elections. “If we allow the registration of voters to continue forever, it would disrupt the commission’s preparations.
