By Adamu Lawal Toro
Technology does not rig elections. People do.
That is the first thing to say about the Independent National Electoral Commission’s new Artificial Intelligence Division.
The second thing is that Nigerians have every right to ask what it is for, who controls it and who checks those who control it.
The facts, as INEC has presented them, are modest. The commission approved the division in May 2025 and placed it within its ICT department. It said the unit would support logistics, voter services, risk detection and what it called “intelligent safeguards.”
This month, the INEC Chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan, went further. He said automated AI auditing tools have been built into the commission’s result verification process, operating under human oversight, to detect anomalies, monitor database traffic and protect its portals from intrusion.
On paper, none of this is alarming. Electoral bodies around the world use data tools to plan logistics and spot irregularities.
But Nigeria is not on paper. Nigeria is a country where trust in elections has been worn thin.
We remember 2023. We remember the promise that results would be uploaded in real time to the IReV portal, and the “glitch” that struck the presidential election alone while governorship and legislative results flowed. We remember the courts ruling that IReV was not a collation system after all.
Millions of voters learnt that the technology they were told to trust could be switched off, sidelined or redefined once the votes were cast.
So when the same commission says AI is now part of result verification, the questions write themselves.
What exactly does the AI verify? Does it compare polling unit result sheets with collated figures, or does it merely flag them? Who decides what counts as an “anomaly”? Can a flagged result be set aside, and on whose authority? Will party agents, observers and the courts see the logs? Will the algorithms be audited by anyone outside INEC?
These are not hostile questions. They are the questions any credible institution should be eager to answer.
The fear in opposition circles is specific. It is that AI could be used to smooth over doctored figures, or to bury manipulated inputs inside a technical process too complex for an aggrieved candidate to challenge in a tribunal.
Whether or not that fear is justified, it is real, and INEC cannot dismiss it with press statements. A system that cannot be examined cannot be trusted. A result that cannot be traced cannot be defended.
The concern is sharpened by perceptions about who sits at the commanding heights of the electoral process.
Many Nigerians believe the key levers, from the commission to the security agencies that guard the ballot, are concentrated in the hands of officials drawn from or aligned with the president’s region.
Whatever the precise balance, perception matters in elections as much as procedure. An umpire must not only be neutral. He must look neutral to every team on the field. That is why INEC must act now, not after the votes are counted.
First, it should publish the AI governance framework it says it is finalising, in full, before the elections. Nigerians should know what the tools do and, more importantly, what they cannot do.
Second, it should state clearly that AI will never alter, generate or replace any result. The polling unit result sheet, signed by agents, must remain the primary evidence of how people voted. Any AI tool should only flag discrepancies for human review, with every flag logged and disclosed.
Third, it should open its systems to independent technical audit by accredited civil society groups, the media and representatives of the political parties.
Partnerships with foreign technology companies are no substitute for scrutiny by Nigerians.
Fourth, the National Assembly must exercise oversight. Lawmakers who approve INEC’s budget should demand to know what this division costs, who built its tools and where its data is stored.
Opposition parties, too, have homework. Suspicion is not a strategy. They must train agents to understand the new systems, insist on access and document every irregularity.
Elections are lost on polling day, but they are also lost in the months when nobody bothered to ask questions.
INEC has a chance to turn a source of suspicion into a source of confidence. Transparency costs it nothing. Secrecy will cost it everything.
In the end, the measure of this AI division will not be its sophistication.
It will be whether a farmer in a village in Bauchi, who queued under the sun to vote, can be sure that the number written on the result sheet at his polling unit is the number that counts in Abuja.
