The Indepebdent National Electoral Commission(INEC) has admitted that some of its own registration officers planted suspected AI-generated photographs in the preliminary voter register, but admits it does not know why they did it.
The commission’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, Lawrence Bayode, made the claim on Friday on Arise Television, after days of public anger over duplicate entries, suspected AI-generated photographs and the names of dead people on the register.
He said the officers, who had login details to enrol eligible voters, abused that access to upload irregular records
Social media users found duplicate entries, photographs that looked AI-generated and the names of dead people. Screenshots from a polling unit in Etsako West, Edo State, spread fastest and raised fresh doubts about the database ahead of the 2027 elections.
On Friday, Bayode, offered an explanation on Arise Television. The register, he said, was open to registration officers in the field, each with login details to enrol eligible voters. Some of them, he claimed, used that access to push in records that should never have been there, including AI-generated images.
“Not all of them,” he stressed, but “some of them across the states nationwide.”
He described other flagged entries as plain “very bad registration,” which suggests the problem is wider than AI photos.
INEC says it caught the entries when its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) was run on the database. The commission can say what happened and how, Bayode said. It cannot say why.
“We know what they did. We know how they did it. But honestly, I don’t know why,” he said.
For critics, that admission will raise more questions than it answers. If officers acted on their own, who checked their work? If someone directed them, who was it? Bayode did not say whether any officer has been identified, disciplined or handed to the police.
He said the clean-up began before the preliminary register went public. It is a race against the statutory 90-day timeline, he said, as the commission works to find and fix discrepancies before registration is completed.
Earlier this week, INEC said the online register is not final and that the suspicious photos are under review. Its final list is due on December 15.