Nigeria’s election commission is adopting artificial intelligence and warning against it in the same speech. Addressing the AI and Democracy Forum 2026 in Abuja on Wednesday, organised by Yiaga Africa with INEC, Microsoft, TikTok and other partners, commission chairman Joash Amupitan posed the forum’s question directly and answered it himself: algorithms will not and must never decide the 2027 vote, which must be decided by the sovereign people of Nigeria. His argument was that AI will unavoidably shape the information environment in which voters choose, the speed and security of election logistics, and the tactics of democratic and anti democratic actors alike, so the task is to keep it a servant of the process rather than its master.
The machinery he described is already substantial. INEC is preparing for more than 100 million registered voters across 176,846 polling units in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, with sensitive materials moving through 774 local government areas. Its candidate nomination portal has processed more than 15,000 nominations from 22 political parties, online voter registration is live, and AI enhanced biometric systems are deduplicating a national register the chairman put at over 13 million records in the passage on identification, detecting facial and fingerprint duplicates. He said algorithms could also flag mathematical inconsistencies and image problems in uploaded polling unit results before they enter the results system, complementing rather than replacing human oversight, and that the commission has established an AI unit inside its ICT department and is finalising a governance framework built on integrity, transparency, human intervention and public auditing, with support from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. A related commitment reported the same day would see Microsoft restrict AI generated images of candidates ahead of the election.
The scepticism in the room was about trust, not tools. Yiaga Africa’s Samson Itodo said public distrust of the process remains high, partly because of technology’s role in the disputed 2023 election, citing his organisation’s new voting intention survey, and warned that deploying technology does not guarantee credible elections without integrity in the people running the systems. He also pressed the growing number of private AI platforms aggregating results to be accurate, transparent and auditable, while accepting only INEC can legally declare results. The commission, for its part, flagged its own exposure: its results and nomination platforms are targets for cyber actors, checked daily for faults and threats. Status: forum held, AI unit established, governance framework in preparation, not yet published.