INEC appealed to the remaining voters to pick up their PVCs from INEC local government area offices.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says 125,928 of the 184,438 newly printed Permanent Voters' Cards (PVCs) have been collected in Edo State ahead of the 21 September governorship election.

Sam Olumekun, INEC's national commissioner and chairperson of the Information and Voter Education Committee, said this in a statement on Tuesday in Abuja.

The PVC collection, he said, represents 68.3 per cent of the 184,438 new cards issued during the recent Continuous Voter Registration exercise.

"This marks the highest collection rate recorded by INEC since the introduction of CVR for off-cycle governorship elections in 2015.

"The collection, which took place across all 192 wards in Edo State between 22 and 26 August was achieved through a carefully coordinated effort by INEC.

"The commission is pleased to announce the conclusion of the collection at Ward level. Learning from the lessons of the previous collection of PVCs, the commission has carefully packaged all the PVCs by Poling Units, Wards and LGAs.

"We also produced the collection register, providing details of the voters whose cards were ready for collection and uploaded the same to our website," he said.

Mr Olumekun said that a detailed breakdown of the collection by local government areas had been uploaded to the INEC website and social media platforms for public information.

He added that the collection would resume in all INEC offices in Edo's 18 local government areas from Wednesday, 28 August to 8 September.

Mr Olumekun appealed to the remaining voters to pick up their PVCs from INEC local government area offices.

"Let me reiterate INEC's policy that no cards should be collected by proxy," he said, adding that detailed information on the locations of INEC local government areas offices was already available on the commission's website.

(NAN)