Purge the register, INEC, before it is too late

By Adamu Lawal Toro

A face that belongs to no one should not choose who governs Nigeria. When the Independent National Electoral Commission announced that it would embed artificial intelligence in the conduct of the 2027 elections, eyebrows were raised. Who would regulate INEC’s use of a technology so powerful and so open to abuse? The commission offered assurances. The fears remained.

With the display of the preliminary voters’ register, those fears are becoming manifest. Barely a month after INEC announced that its register had crossed 103 million names, Nigerians scrolling through it found faces that did not look human. Faces with the unmistakable sheen of artificial intelligence.

INEC first called them “suspected” images and said the online register did not reflect ongoing data clean-up. Three days later, its own Director of ICT, Lawrence Bayode, went further. Some registration officers, he said, had used their official logins to add questionable records in several states. Some of the photographs were AI-generated. Others reflected “very bad registration.”

That is not a rumour from a partisan blogger. That is an admission from inside the commission.

And it raises questions INEC has not yet answered. How many records were added this way? In which states and wards? Which officers did it, and on whose instruction? Will they be prosecuted?
Silence on these questions is not an option. The commission plans to certify the final register on 15 December. Once that happens, every fake name on it becomes a legal entry, a ballot waiting for a hand. The window to clean the register is not months. It is weeks.

But care is needed. Social media is awash with figures: 20 million AI voters, even 50 million. None of these numbers has come with a method, a sample or a single verifiable dataset. Inflated claims do the riggers’ work for them. They tell the young voter in Gombe or Ogbomoso that his vote is already stolen, so why bother? A demoralised electorate is the easiest one to defeat.
The truth is serious enough without exaggeration. INEC has admitted that insiders manipulated the register. The scale is unknown. That alone should alarm every Nigerian, whatever their party.

It should also alarm INEC, because the commission’s credibility is its only real asset. Its chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, has said that “algorithms will not and must never decide the 2027 votes.” But Nigerians will judge the commission by what it does before 15 December, not by what it says at conferences.

So what must INEC do?

First, publish the numbers. The commission says its Automated Biometric Identification System flagged the irregularities. Then it knows how many records were flagged. It should publish that figure, broken down by state and local government, and update it weekly until certification.

Second, purge the fakes in public view. Every record removed should be listed, with the reason for removal: duplicate, deceased, underage, fabricated image. Political parties and accredited observers should be invited to witness the process and test the results.

Third, hand over the register. The Electoral Act entitles political parties to copies of the voter register. INEC should release the cleaned version early enough for parties, civil society and the media to audit it before certification, not after.

Fourth, name and sanction the officers involved. If staff used official logins to plant fake voters, that is not “very bad registration.” It is an electoral offence, and it should be prosecuted as one.
Fifth, extend the timeline if necessary. If the clean-up cannot be completed credibly by 15 December, INEC should say so and adjust. A delayed, clean register is better than a punctual, poisoned one.
INEC cannot do this alone, nor should it be trusted to.

The National Assembly’s committees on electoral matters must summon the commission and demand a full account of every AI system it uses: what it does, who supplied it and who audits it. The question Nigerians asked at the start remains unanswered: no law today regulates how INEC deploys artificial intelligence. That gap must be closed by regulation before the election, not by apology after it.

Political parties must stop treating the register as INEC’s business alone. Every party has agents in every ward. Let them check the names against the people they know.

And the media, including this newspaper, must do what journalism exists to do: verify. Pick the wards. Find the names. Photograph the faces. Report what is proven, and label what is not.

Ordinary citizens have a role too. Check your own details on the register. Report entries you know to be false. Collect your PVC. On election day, stay to watch the count and photograph the result sheet at your polling unit.

A fake name in the register does not steal an election by itself. Someone still has to vote it, and that vote must still survive the collation centre. But the register is the foundation. Build the election on a corrupted list, and every result that follows will carry a question mark.

Nigeria has been here before. Ghost workers on the payroll. Ghost beneficiaries in social investment programmes. Now the ghosts have learned to use artificial intelligence.

The farmer in Toro who will walk two kilometres to vote in January deserves to know that his ballot will be counted alongside real neighbours, not invented ones. That is the least a democracy owes him. INEC has six weeks. It should use every one of them.