First, a caveat that must not be mistaken for cowardice: I do not work for INEC. I do not hold a brief for the merchants of panic who profit from every screenshot, nor do I hold a brief for a commission that asks for trust on credit and without evidence. Two storms are gathering over 2027, and they share the same wind: credibility.
On one side, INEC has admitted that some AI-generated photographs slipped into its preliminary voters’ register. On the other, INEC published a final list of governorship and State House of Assembly candidates on October 10, only to revise it on October 29 following a flood of petitions, removing names that were previously cleared and restoring others that were omitted.
The public is now asking a single, simple, devastating question: who is really on the ballot, and who is really in the register?
Picture a young man in Bauchi, scrolling through the preliminary register that INEC displayed physically from October 9 to 15 and published online from October 26. A face looks too smooth, too symmetrical, like a Nollywood poster filtered to perfection.
Another looks like a video game character who wandered into a polling unit. He takes a screenshot and sends it to his family WhatsApp group, declaring that AI has filled the register and 2027 is already stolen. In two minutes, a legitimate lead turns into a frightening conclusion. The screenshot is useful, but it is not proof.
We have been burnt before, and our elders have a saying for it: Eni ti ina jo, yio beru eeru – he who has been burnt by fire fears ashes. Nigerians were burnt in 2023, and a child who is burnt by hot soup learns to blow even on cold water.
But fear sharpened by the last election must sharpen scrutiny, not settle the verdict before the evidence arrives.
INEC maintains that what it displayed is preliminary, not final, with final certification due on December 15. It states that the register now holds over 103 million names, up from 93,469,008 in 2023. A rise of roughly 10 million is not, by itself, evidence of fraud. Children who were in JSS2 in 2023 are now 18.
The commission reports that its latest Continuous Voter Registration attracted over ten million fresh registrants. As my grandmother would say – a big head does not mean the child is wearing a mask. A big number does not automatically equal a ghost voter, but a big number must be explained.
Then came the more consequential confession. Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s Director of ICT, told Arise News that some photographs were AI-generated, while other irregularities stemmed from poor registration practices by officers who had access to the system.
Pause there and listen to what is being said – and what is not being said. That is not a story of rogue robots invading INEC servers at midnight. That is a story of human beings with passwords. AI did not log itself in.
A human logged in and used AI to make fabrication easier, generating a plausible face where no face should exist.
The campaign team of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar has cited an allegation that more than twenty million AI images may be involved. That is a grave claim. As of this writing, I have seen no public forensic audit substantiating that figure.
It must remain an allegation, not a fact, and it certainly must not be converted overnight into twenty million fake voters.
Let us untangle the calabash, as three distinct issues are currently being poured into a single bucket called AI: an AI-generated photograph, the voter record into which that photograph was inserted, and the ability of that record to survive biometric accreditation and cast a ballot on election day.
A synthetic face beside a name is reason to investigate, but it does not prove a ghost can vote. That depends on fingerprints, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, and audit trails.
However, if an officer could insert a synthetic image, INEC cannot wave it away by arguing that the final list is not yet certified. A process that permits abuse must be audited before certification, not after public confidence has been completely spent.
Technology did not betray us; supervision did. The image may be synthetic, but the access controls, supervision, and accountability are human – painfully human.
There is another distinction Nigerians must maintain. INEC has announced an AI unit to monitor threats, identify deepfakes, and support verification. The chairman has been quoted stating that algorithms will not – and must never – decide the 2027 vote.
Defensive AI is not the same as offensive fabrication, yet both require oversight. What exactly will these systems do? Who oversees the overseer? How does a voter challenge an algorithm’s decision? Calling both the cutlass and the farmer who misuses it by the same name leaves us blind.
The lessons of 2023 are still speaking, if only we would listen. The EU Election Observation Mission noted that severely delayed displays of presidential result forms on the IReV portal severely eroded trust. An empty portal is not neutral.
A voter refreshing IReV and seeing nothing begins to wonder whether the result has been uploaded, delayed, or tampered with.
In a tense election, those questions are quickly met with screenshots, guesswork, and accusations. When official information arrives late or piecemeal, rumour does not wait politely outside the door.
The same pattern now stalks the register. If the public cannot tell which version it is viewing, what has been corrected, or when the final version will be published, uncertainty becomes central to the story.
Furthermore, disinformation did not rely on generative AI in 2023. The Nigeria Fact-Checkers’ Coalition conducted 127 fact-checks across the presidential, National Assembly, governorship, and State Assembly polls without needing a single synthetic image.
Partisan amplification, weak verification, and careless sharing did the damage. People recycled old footage, fabricated statements, and passed off partisan claims as confirmed news. Generative AI lowers the barrier to entry, but it did not create the underlying disease.
I once described fact-checking as a purification process where raw material enters the newsroom, and journalists must verify it before serving it as news.
That work matters more than ever. A detection tool may flag suspicious content, but a flag is not a final verdict. Reporters must trace the source, inspect the context, contact relevant parties, and state clearly what is confirmed, what is alleged, and what remains unknown.
The historical numbers also remind us not to confuse registration with turnout. Out of 93.47 million registered voters in 2023, roughly 24.9 million voted in the presidential election – a turnout of 26.72 per cent.
Low turnout raises serious questions about public confidence, but it does not render the register irrelevant. It shows that headline numbers alone cannot predict how or if people will vote.
Then comes the second hullabaloo: the tale of the de-registered candidates, which rhymes neatly with the first.
On October 10, INEC published final candidate lists for the governorship and State Assembly elections. Conspicuous omissions immediately sparked an uproar, including former Communications Minister Isa Ali Pantami, Ladi Adebutu, Abdulsalam Gwarzo, Danjuma Laah, Sebastine Hon, and others.
INEC justified the exclusions by citing the Supreme Court’s September 24 judgment in INEC v. Zenith Labour Party, which upheld the constitutionality of Sections 77(5–7) and 84(2) of the Electoral Act 2026.
This provision mandates that political parties submit their membership registers to INEC, and only individuals listed at least 21 days prior to the primaries may participate.
Section 77(7) explicitly states that a non-compliant party cannot field a candidate. INEC applied the ruling, citing Section 287(1) of the Constitution, which obliges all authorities to give effect to Supreme Court judgments.
Here is the twist that spices the soup while leaving a bitter aftertaste. Some candidates swear they registered, yet were excluded. Some joined parties between April 21 and May 10 – after membership registration had closed – yet appeared on both the October 10 and revised October 29 lists.
Some submitted their details to INEC, yet were missing, while others were absent from membership registers, yet were cleared subject to pending court cases. The confusion is complete. The cloth intended to heal the wound is now being used to cover shame.
A farmer plants yam, then tries to insert fresh cuttings into the same mound after planting season has closed; the mound rejects them. The Electoral Act stipulates that party membership must precede the primary.
You cannot join a party after the register has closed and claim you were on it before the primary. Yet some did, and still appeared on the list. That is the systemic glitch people fear.
INEC invited petitions under Section 32(2) of the Electoral Act before an October 24 deadline. Petitions flooded in: 69 for governorship races across 12 parties in 26 states, with 41 succeeding and 28 failing, alongside 61 for State Assemblies across 11 parties in 11 states, where 25 succeeded, and 36 failed.
In total, 130 petitions yielded 66 approvals and 64 rejections. By October 29, Pantami and Gwarzo were provisionally cleared subject to pending court cases, while Adebutu remained uncleared. Meanwhile, several names published in error on October 10 were delisted after verification confirmed their absence from official party registers.
When INEC states that Pantami is cleared subject to a court case, what is a voter in Gombe supposed to do with provisional clearance? When Gwarzo remains omitted under court order despite provisional clearance, what should a voter in Kano believe?
When Adebutu, a stormy petrel in Ogun, is shut out over a register technicality, what does a PDP foot soldier tell the market woman? When defectors who joined after May 19 appear on the ballot while long-standing members do not, what lesson does a young party member draw about the rule of law?
As the saying goes, the goat is not illiterate; the goat is discriminating. The public is now being positively discriminating. Voters can distinguish between a technical disqualification and political exclusion.
They remember Osun, and Anambra before it, where national figures stood tall, yet voters looked down the ballot and asked who this candidate was who only appeared during primaries. They punished complacency with surgical precision. They have learned to sift and separate the presidential candidate from the local candidate.
The same hand that marks a ballot for Tinubu on January 16 will vote against a lazy or legally shaky candidate on the very same paper, in the very same booth, on the very same day.
We have only seventy days until the first set of elections, and credibility cannot be fine-tuned at 2:00 a.m. on election eve. What INEC must do before certifying the final voter register on December 15 – and before the candidate list becomes the final ballot – is not a public relations exercise, but a matter of institutional safeguard.
It must publish the cleaning methodology, disclosing how many records were flagged, the categories of irregularities, the tests applied, and how many entries were corrected, removed, or retained. It must preserve all underlying biometric records and access logs, and invite independent technical reviews featuring Nigerian ICT experts, political party representatives, and civil society organisations under strict privacy protections to aggregate findings publicly.
Furthermore, version transparency must be ensured by clearly distinguishing between preliminary and final documents on every public release, explaining what changed, when, and why.
A documented correction today is far better than an unexplained discrepancy discovered on election morning. INEC must also provide line-by-line legal clarity, publishing detailed, state-by-state reasoning for affected candidates rather than generic press statements, explaining explicitly why Pantami is cleared subject to court action while Adebutu is not, or why Gwarzo remains omitted.
Accessible citizen and party membership verification portals with clear deadlines and transparent objection resolution paths are essential, alongside the uniform application of Supreme Court rulings.
If Section 77 makes the membership register mandatory, enforce it equally across all parties – not as a technicality for some and a formality for others. Ti a ba fi owo osi juwe ile baba eni, iwa alailojuti ni, the Yoruba say – if you point to your father’s house with your left hand, you signal to onlookers that you carry no pride in it.
The media’s responsibility is equally clear. Journalists must not publish a suspicious photo as definitive proof of a fictitious voter, nor report unverified claims – such as the twenty million fake voters allegation – as established fact without forensic evidence.
AI-detection tools should not be treated as infallible oracles, and candidate de-registrations must not be framed as conspiracies without first checking membership cutoff dates and court orders. A flag is not a verdict.
Political parties must also take responsibility by refraining from shopping for candidates after registers have closed. The law you applauded when it favoured you will penalise you when it does not. Parties must submit clean registers, conduct valid primaries, and remind their candidates that a presidential coattail will not carry them if they lack genuine standing on their constituents’ register.
Two registers present one crucial lesson. Both the voters’ register and the party membership register ask the exact same question: who is truly registered? The answer must be verifiable, not merely verbal. Elections are not stolen on election day alone; they are lost or saved in registers, in audit logs, and on candidate lists long before a thumb meets ink.
The drumbeat has changed, and the dancer must adjust their steps. Seventy days is not the time for hullabaloo – it is the time for thorough house-cleaning.
Let us neither declare the entire register imaginary nor expect Nigerians to accept it on blind faith. Let us neither brand every de-registered candidate a victim nor assume every inclusion is a corrupt compromise.
Let us demand evidence, publish evidence, and preserve evidence. The credibility of the 2027 elections will not be saved by panic, nor by denial. It will be secured by verification.