The Executive Director of foremost election observer, Yiaga Africa, 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 sheet of papers 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 Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) conducted presidential and National Assembly elections across the country on Saturday.

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.

At the end of the polls on Saturday, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared winner of the presidential election by the Chairman of INEC, Mahmood Yakubu, on Wednesday.

According to INEC, Tinubu was victorious in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states, and secured significant numbers in several other states to claim the highest number of votes — 8,794,726, almost two million votes more than his closest rival, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Contesting for the sixth time, Atiku got 6,984,520 votes, while the candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, finished the race with 6,101,533.

Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, received his certificate of return from INEC on Wednesday afternoon, alongside his running mate Kashim Shettima.

Channels TV