Few months to the 2027 general election, the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC on Wednesday said it was still awaiting the full release of a substantial budget proposed for the polls, even as it moves ahead with plans for a mock presidential election designed to test the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) under conditions similar to election day.
INEC, in its daily bulletin of Wednesday, said its chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan, SAN, stated this at the 13th Annual International Conference of the Association of Communication Scholars & Professionals of Nigeria ACSPN, held at the National Open University Conference Centre, Abuja.
Represented by National Commissioner, Sani Adam, SAN, Amupitan who spoke on the theme, “Media, Technology and Elections in Africa: Navigating Digital Disruption and the New Dynamics of Electoral Communication,” said the proposed budget carries significant allocations for technology and election operations, including new accreditation devices to replace those lost or damaged in the last electoral cycle.
While full release of the funds remains pending, he noted that the Commission’s ICT team has already engaged manufacturers on procurement, with planning for the technology audit and the proposed mock election proceeding alongside budget finalisation.
The INEC Chairman disclosed that the Commission is undertaking a comprehensive audit of its electoral technology systems, covering system redundancy, penetration testing and disaster recovery planning, and is exploring the conduct of a mock presidential election ahead of 2027 to test accreditation, transmission and results viewing under conditions similar to election day.
Amupitan called for electoral technology and electoral communication to be treated as a single discipline, warning that the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven disinformation poses one of the most serious threats to the credibility of the 2027 election.
He said the Commission’s credibility now rests as much on how information about its processes is understood and trusted as it does on the integrity of the ballot, the BVAS and result sheets.
Amupitan noted that the deployment of BVAS and IReV was designed to close a longstanding credibility gap in the nation’s elections, giving citizens the ability to view polling unit results before they could be altered en route to collation.
He, however, acknowledged that the 2023 General Election showed that such technology could become a source of public doubt when it underperformed, stressing that legitimacy is earned only when systems perform reliably, are well understood, and are explained honestly when they fall short.
On the threat of synthetic and fabricated content, the INEC Chairman said generative AI has made it increasingly cheap and difficult to detect manipulated video, audio and imagery, citing documented cases of doctored political content during recent electoral cycles in West and East Africa, including footage that circulated around Nigeria’s 2023 presidential contest.
He warned that such content could spread to millions of social media users before verification is possible, cautioning that the danger lies not only in outright fabrication but also in algorithmic microtargeting, which allows conflicting messages to reach narrow segments of the electorate without a shared factual foundation.
Outlining a five-point approach for the Commission going forward, Amupitan called for the integration of technology and communication planning, a dedicated rapid-response capability for countering falsehoods within the same news cycle, pre-emptive public communication about known vulnerabilities and safeguards, deeper partnership with media scholars, fact-checkers and technology platforms, and sustained investment in public media literacy.
He commended INEC’s ongoing collaboration with international partners on cybersecurity architecture and system resilience, and invited ACSPN and Nigeria’s communication scholars into structured collaboration on media literacy research, synthetic content detection, and training for journalists and civic educators.
The Chairman observed that Nigeria’s 2027 electorate will be younger and more mobile-first than any before it, describing the smartphone as the primary window through which many voters will experience the election.
He cautioned that solutions adopted elsewhere must be adapted to Nigeria’s own realities of internet access, language diversity and institutional trust, and stressed that INEC’s response to disinformation would be to provide better and faster information rather than to restrict legitimate journalism or civic dissent.
