Why Nigeria keeps having congested polling units
Nigeria
The current configuration of 119,973 Polling Units was established by the defunct National Electoral Commission
of Nigeria (NECON) in 1996. In the nearly 25-year period since then, every attempt to review or reconfigure the Polling Unit structure has been unsuccessful for sundry reasons. Consequently, the 1996 Polling Unit configuration was used for the 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019 General Elections. When the Polling Unit structure was established in 1996, it was projected to serve about 50 million registered voters. However, the number of registered voters for the 1999 General Election was 57.93 million. This rose to 60.82 million in 2003, 61.56
This lack of correlation between the number of registered voters and the number of Polling Units since 1999
has resulted in congested Polling Units on Election Day and lack of Polling Units in many developing suburban
and newly established settlements.
