The Executive Director of Yiaga Africa, a foremost election observer group, Samson Itodo says about 200 million ballot papers were wasted in the just concluded presidential and National Assembly elections because a lot of people did not show up to cast their votes.
Itodo stated this on Channels Television’s The 2023 Verdict on Wednesday.
“If 72 million ballot papers were issued to these accredited voters. We have about 200 million sheets of paper that have gone to waste. And if you check how much was expended per voter in this election, it was somewhere around six to eight dollars per voter.
“If you multiply that you discover that we have wasted billions of naira because people didn’t show up to cast their votes. And so that is money that could have been used to provide drugs to our primary healthcare centres,” Itodo said.
The number of registered voters was 93,469,008. The total of collected permanent voter cards was 87.2 million against 176,606 polling units. However, according to INEC, 25,286,616 voters were accredited.