The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said hoodlums forcibly snatched about 14,000 Permanent Voter’s Cards (PVCs) from officials of the commission during the collection exercise in Rivers State.
The state Resident
Electoral Commissioner (REC), Mrs. Gesila Khan, made the disclosure while
speaking to journalists in Port Harcourt on Friday.
She said some of the
cards were stolen from local government collection centres where the PVCs were
deposited at the close of the collection exercise to enable the rightful owners
pick them up at their own time before the elections.
The
resident electoral commissioner, who expressed dismay at the action of the
hoodlums, expressed regret that Rivers State recorded one of the highest cases
of stolen PVCs in the country.
Her words: “I am
appealing to Rivers people because we have lost a lot of cards. We have lost
more than 14,000 PVCs and it is one of the highest figures in the federation.
“All the cards that are
being snatched are useless and meaningless because we are going to use a new
system called card readers. Your card readers are just like ATM cards.
You take it there and they slot it into the card reader to confirm if it is
yours before you are allowed to vote.
“So, if you go there
with another person’s voter’s card, it is meaningless. So, I am advising those
of you with other peoples’ cards to return them to the local government offices
so that the rightful owners can collect them so that they can participate in
the general election”.
Mrs. Khan assured that the 2015 election would be peaceful
because of the cooperation among INEC, police and other security agencies in
the state.
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