INEC’s admission that its own registration officers let suspicious faces into the preliminary register is not a glitch to be cleaned quietly. It is a test of whether January’s election will belong to the living.
There are 68 days to the presidential and National Assembly elections of January 16, 2027, and the Independent National Electoral Commission has already handed Nigerians a reason to worry. On October 26, the Commission uploaded its preliminary register of voters of 103.4 million names. On the surface, that is good news. More Nigerians registered should mean more Nigerians ready to have a say in who governs them. But tucked inside that register were faces that do not appear to belong to anybody. Within days, citizens scrolling through the online register, starting with polling units in Etsako West, Edo State, were sharing screenshots of voter photographs that looked less like Nigerians and more like the output of an app. INEC has since admitted that some of its own registration officers put them there.
If that explanation calms you, you have not been paying attention to Nigerian elections. Rigging does not begin on election day. It does not begin with ballot box snatching or thugs at the collation centre. It begins quietly, in the register. Nigerians know the old script by heart. For decades, the ghost voter was a familiar character, it used to be a dead man still listed in his ward, an underage child hiding under an oversized cap, a single name cloned five times across polling units in a Niger Delta creek or a remote settlement in the Sahel. That was old school rigging. It needed printed forms, manual thumbprinting, a fair amount of sweat and a cooperative official willing to look the other way. What surfaced in October is something else, It is not the resurrection of the dead. It is the manufacture of people who never lived at all.
When the 103.4 million figure was announced, there was a good deal of back patting in Abuja. INEC’s Director of ICT, Dr Lawrence Bayode, explained that more than nine million new registrants had been added to the 93 million used in 2023. In the official telling, the number was a trophy, a proof that despite the cost of living crisis, the fuel queues and a deep weariness with politics, Nigerians still believe in the ballot box. It was a fine story. The problem was what journalists, tech savvy observers and civil society groups found when they began to look closely. They did not only find the faces of our uncles, sisters and neighbours. They found perfection. Skin that had never sweated under the harmattan sun or the hot lamp of a crowded registration centre. Faces without the natural asymmetry every human face carries, with no tribal marks, no stray shadow behind the ear, no crease on the collar. Eyes that stared into the camera with the flat, uncanny gaze of a digital render. These did not look like Nigerians who had queued to register. They looked like pixels.
To its credit, the Commission did not take the familiar route of blanket denial. Speaking on Arise Television on October 30, Dr Bayode said some of the pictures were AI generated, while others were simply very bad registration, and that both entered the database through registration officers who had been given login access to register voters. He insisted INEC itself did not use artificial intelligence to register anybody. The Commission says it has received more than 4,800 claims and about 600 objections during the display period, has flagged 268 questionable records for investigation, and will hand a clean register to political parties on December 15. Its Chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria who understands the weight of evidence better than most, has urged citizens to scrutinise the register and report what they find. That candour matters, But it does not close the matter, It opens it.
The worst part is not that this happened. It is who did it. Not Russian hackers. Not Yahoo boys working from a cybercafé. INEC’s own staff. People entrusted with an official username and password to register real Nigerians used that access, by the Commission’s own account, to insert entries that should never have existed. That tells us two things. First, internal controls are weak enough that a field officer can upload a fabricated face without the system stopping him. Second, someone may have had a reason to want such entries there. Registration officers do not usually forge voters for the fun of it. So the uncomfortable question follows: who pays for fake registrations? Historically, the answer has been politicians who want inflated numbers in their strongholds.
Here lies the real question. INEC speaks of 268 records under investigation. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, has alleged that more than 20 million images may be involved and has demanded an independent forensic audit. Those two figures are worlds apart, and neither has been independently verified. That gap is precisely why transparency is not optional. A register of 103.4 million names cannot be certified on the strength of a press statement.
The reactions of the parties tell their own story. The ADC wants the officials involved named and prosecuted. The Nigeria Democratic Congress, the platform of Peter Obi, had earlier accused the Commission of plotting to use AI to rig the polls for the ruling party. Smaller parties, such as the Action Democratic Party, have joined calls for a forensic audit. Prominent figures in the ruling All Progressives Congress, including the Minister of Aviation, Festus Keyamo, have pushed back against the critics. Every posture here is political. Those out of power have every reason to amplify doubt; those in power rarely complain about a register they expect to win on. Make no mistake, every camp is already preparing for the tribunal.
When a register is discredited weeks before an election, the foundation is being laid to argue afterwards that the election itself was not credible. It is a familiar script. The danger is that Nigerians, hearing every side cry wolf, stop believing there is ever a wolf.
In 2019, the question of whether INEC kept a central results server became a centrepiece of the presidential election petition. In 2023, the Results Viewing Portal, IReV, which Nigerians were told would make results transparent in real time, faltered on presidential results on election night, even as National Assembly results from the same polling units on the same day went up. Each time, the explanation was a technical glitch. Each time, a little more public trust drained away. BVAS and IReV were meant to be the reforms that ended this cycle. Now, with that technology in place, we are staring at AI faces in the register. If we cannot trust registration officers with a login, how do we trust collation officers with a result sheet?
This crisis also says something about the country we have become. Ordinary Nigerians fight daily battles with technology. Ask anyone who has queued for hours to obtain a National Identification Number or link a SIM card, only to be told the network is down, or that their fingerprints cannot be captured because years of farm work or workshop labour have worn the ridges smooth. In the same country, young people casually use AI apps to change their hair colour on Instagram or generate a slick avatar for a profile picture. While the youth play with these tools for fun, someone inside the democratic machinery appears to have realised the same technology could help manufacture a constituency. Consider the sheer audacity.
In the past, padding the register in a local government area meant hiring buses, moving crowds and slipping them past watchful community members. Today, all a corrupt insider needs is a stable connection, a free image generator and compromised access to the system. A few clicks, and a whole village of photogenic people who do not exist is born. These digital citizens eat no food, demand no roads, never complain about inflation and do not care what electricity costs. Whether such entries could ever pass biometric accreditation on BVAS is a fair question. But a register padded with phantoms provides cover for inflated figures and doctored margins, quietly overriding the real people who stood in the rain to vote.
This changes the meaning of political accountability. Imagine a constituency of 50,000 real voters, angry with a representative who has delivered nothing. If 20,000 phantom entries are quietly injected into that local register, their anger can be diluted. The politician no longer needs to campaign, build clinics or listen to grievances. His real constituency becomes whoever holds the credentials to the database. The centre of gravity of our democracy shifts from the polling unit under the village tree to the server room in Abuja.
This is not a partisan matter. It does not matter which party benefits today, because a broken door lets in every thief, whatever his party card.
Section 14 of the 1999 Constitution declares that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria, from whom government derives all its powers and authority. An algorithm is not the people. A line of code cannot pay tax, cannot hold a passport and will never live with the consequences of bad governance.
The December 15 deadline is therefore not just an administrative milestone. It is a test of institutional credibility. Cleaning the register cannot be a quiet bureaucratic exercise conducted behind closed doors. INEC should tell the public how the suspicious entries were detected, how many were found, which registration areas they came from, and what disciplinary and legal action is being taken against officers who misused their access. Our electoral law already punishes tampering with the register. Nigerians deserve to see it applied to insiders, not only to the hapless citizen who registered twice.
The Commission should go further and publish a regular public dashboard of the cleanup, how many entries have been removed, from which states, and how many have been traced to which officers. Let civil society groups such as Yiaga Africa and the Situation Room, alongside the media, scrutinise it as it happens. Let domestic and international observers, including ECOWAS, follow it closely. Openness is the cheapest confidence INEC can buy.
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Time is the other enemy. Between now and January 16, INEC must print ballot papers, train well over a million ad hoc staff and move materials to 176,846 polling units across 774 local government areas, many of them in places where banditry, insurgency or separatist agitation make movement dangerous. If the Commission is still struggling to clean its own database today, Nigerians are entitled to ask what happens when the hard logistics begin. If INEC fails this test in December, it will struggle to pass the bigger one in January.
And it matters, because Nigerians still want to vote. Despite the hardship, despite japa draining our young talent abroad, more than nine million new voters came forward to register. That is an act of faith and INEC must not betray it.
Citizens also can not leave this to computer scientists and data analysts. If you can use a smartphone to scroll Facebook or send a WhatsApp voice note, you have enough digital literacy to understand that your vote is threatened by a ghost in the machine. INEC’s chairman has asked Nigerians to scrutinise the register; take him at his word. Check your details on the online portal, Look at the names and faces listed for your polling unit. Raise an objection when something does not belong. Treat the register not as a static document but as a living shield for your rights.
The figure of 103.4 million is not a celebration, It is a question. How many are real? How many are ghosts? The answer will decide whether 2027 is an election of the people or an election of phantoms.
Nigerians should hold INEC to its December promise, not with applause, but with demands for evidence, a published report, not a press statement; entries removed, officers prosecuted, systems fixed. Because if we do not clean the register, we will not clean the election. And if we do not clean the election, we cannot begin to clean Nigeria.
Do not let ghosts decide your future. You are real, Your vote is real, Nigeria is real, Defend it!
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