Rethinking Nigeria’s electoral legal framework: a focus on eligible voters’ disenfranchisement

Abstract

Psephologists have established that election is one of the most critical factors central to the principle and practice of democracy. For any democracy to be consolidated, electoral process which is the method of political recruitment must be all-inclusive. That is, no eligible voter should be disenfranchised. Appreciable scholarship efforts have been invested in the study of election and electoral process in Nigeria, however, little attention is given to the disenfranchisement of some eligible voters by the country's electoral framework. It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the legal and illegal disenfranchisement of some categories of people by Nigeria's electoral management body using the 2015 General elections as point of reference. The main thrust of the paper is to identify the factors responsible for the disenfranchisement and the implications on electoral outcome and democratic consolidation in Nigeria. The paper adopts the basic propositions of the theory of Institutional Legitimacy to study the technical disenfranchisement of large number of eligible voters by INEC in the 2015 general elections. Data were gathered from secondary source and descriptive method of data analysis is adopted. The paper found that legal framework of the electoral system and institutional lapses are responsible for the massive disenfranchisement of eligible voters, especially the ad-hoc staff that was recruited for election duties and voters who could not access their Permanent Voter's Card (P VCs) as result of poor distribution of PVCs in some states. The paper among others calls for a review of the electoral process to allow the electoral workers vote during elections.