The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said yesterday in Abuja that only 274,620 out of the 628,100 registered voters in the FCT exercised their civic responsibility in Saturday's presidential elections.

This represents about 45 per cent of the total number of eligible registered voters in the FCT, reports the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

An analysis of the FCT results, released by INEC, revealed that the total valid votes cast in the FCT, during the April 19 presidential election, was 261,163, while a total of 13,457 votes were declared as rejected ballots.

NAN recalls that foreign observers, monitoring the polls in parts of the country, attributed the inability of voters to either identify their party symbols on the ballot papers or to vote properly on low level of literacy.

Chief Observer of the EU-EOM in Nigeria, Dr Max Van Den Berg, noted that only 51 per cent of Nigerians were literate and that could affect the sustenance of democracy.

NAN correspondents, who monitored the elections in the FCT, reports that some voters do not know how to handle the ballot papers at most of the polling stations visited.

"You hear people with ballot papers asking what they were expected to do or where to thumb print," a presiding officer told NAN.