The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has attributed the appearance of suspected artificial intelligence-generated photographs in its preliminary voter register to irregularities involving some officials responsible for voter registration.
Key Highlights
- INEC blames some registration officers for suspected AI-generated photos in the preliminary voter register.
- Irregular entries detected through the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS).
- Some images were AI-generated; others resulted from poor registration.
- INEC says it knows how the entries got in, but not why.
- Commission cleaning up the register within the statutory 90-day window.
INEC’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, Lawrence Bayode, made the disclosure on Friday during an interview on Arise Television, explaining that certain registration officers allegedly used their authorised access to introduce questionable entries into the commission’s database.
Bayode said the commission uncovered the suspicious records through its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which was deployed to examine voter registration data and identify irregularities.
According to him, although registration officers are provided with individual login credentials to carry out their duties, some allegedly misused that access during the registration process.
“We have registration officers on the field. And these registration officers, they have login details to log into the system.
“So, what we have found is that some of these registration officers, not all of them now, some of them across the states nationwide, they’ve done different things to bring these irregularities onto the register,” he said.
Not All Images AI-Generated
The ICT director explained that the questionable entries were not limited to AI-generated photographs, as the commission also discovered images resulting from poorly conducted registration exercises.
“Some of these pictures are AI-generated. Some of them not AI-generated, but very bad registration. And this thing got into the register by the registration officers and because they have access to register people,” Bayode stated.
He disclosed that INEC had established how some of the irregular entries were introduced into the database, although the reasons behind the actions of the officers concerned remained unclear.
“When the ABIS was run on the system, we saw these people. We know what they did. We know how they did it. But honestly, I don’t know why,” he added.
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Clean-Up Underway
Bayode further explained that the electoral commission had already commenced efforts to identify and remove problematic entries before making the preliminary voter register available to the public.
He noted that the commission was also working within the statutory 90-day timeframe for completing the relevant registration processes.
The explanation comes amid growing public concern over unusual photographs and other questionable details identified in the preliminary voter register published on INEC’s website on October 26, 2026.
The development has raised questions about the integrity of voter registration procedures and the safeguards governing access to the commission’s electoral database.
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