Section 15

This section provides that the Commission shall print a voters' register for each State and also reproduce and save it in an “electronic format.”

Any person or political party may obtain from the Commission, on payment of fees prescribed by the Commission, a certified copy of any voters' register for the State or for a Local Government or Area Council or registration area within it.

The repealed 2010 Act mandated the Commission to print and issue a voters’ register for each State but did not mandate for it to be put in an electronic format, even though the commission had embraced the practice of digitalising the voters register.

An Electronic Voter Register (EVR) is a key component of an Electronic Voting System. INEC has noted that the first step towards successful electronic voting is a robust biometric register of voters. While efforts to build an electronic database goes back as far as 2002, INEC was able to successfully compile a reliable biometric register for the 2011 elections with over 73 million voters captured and after that, 68 million for the 2015 elections when the register was cleaned up. It stood at over 84 million voters in 2019 and ahead of the 2023 elections, the number of registered voters biometrically captured is about 95 million. INEC describes it as the largest electronic database of Nigerians in existence.

The Voter’s register is also an important document which is crucial for voter accreditation during elections. While it The Presiding Officer is required to tick the manual voters register when a voter presents his/her card for accreditation.