The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has attributed the appearance of suspected artificial intelligence-generated photographs and other irregularities in its preliminary voter register to alleged misconduct by some registration officers with access to its portal.
The commission’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, Lawrence Bayode, disclosed this on Friday during an interview on Arise Television, where he addressed concerns surrounding the recently released preliminary register.
INEC has faced criticism on social media after members of the public identified duplicate entries, suspected AI-generated photographs and names of deceased persons in the register.
Images circulated online showed entries from a polling unit in Etsako West Local Government Area of Edo State featuring photographs suspected to have been generated using artificial intelligence, prompting questions about the accuracy of the data.
However, Bayode blamed some registration officers across the country for the discrepancies, alleging that they used their login credentials to insert questionable records into the database.
“We have registration officers on the field. And these registration officers, they have login details to log into the system,” he said.
“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.
“Some of these pictures are 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 said the commission had established how some of the irregularities were introduced but could not determine the officers’ reasons for doing so.
“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 said.
He added that INEC had been working to clean up the register before releasing its preliminary version, explaining that the commission was under pressure to complete the exercise within the statutory 90-day period.