The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will conduct a nationwide mock accreditation and voting exercise on November 28, according to its chairman, Joash Amupitan.
Amupitan announced the exercise on Thursday during a dialogue at Chatham House in London, where he said the commission had resolved problems that affected the performance of its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) during the 2023 elections.
The malfunctions were linked to extreme heat and storage conditions.
The dialogue, organised in partnership with the Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI), was themed “Nigeria’s 2027 elections: democratic trajectory and regional stability beyond the ballot”.
According to a statement issued by Adedayo Oketola, his chief press secretary, Amupitan urged Nigerians to have confidence in his leadership to deliver free, fair and credible general elections in 2027.
“On the 28th of this month, we will conduct a mock accreditation and voting exercise across all states of the federation to simulate the presidential election and verify that we have gotten both accreditation and electronic result transmission right,” Amupitan said.
The INEC chairman also highlighted operational improvements recorded by the commission during recent off-cycle elections.
He said new technical safeguards had been introduced to prevent a recurrence of the controversies surrounding the 2023 general elections.
Amupitan disclosed that INEC had purchased additional devices and reduced the maximum number of voters assigned to each BVAS machine from 1,250 to 850.
He added that polling units with more than 850 registered voters would receive multiple devices.
According to him, the commission’s post-2023 audit identified collation centres, rather than polling units, as the main source of serious election result-management failures.
To prevent discrepancies between polling unit figures and collation sheets, Amupitan said INEC had introduced strict validation measures to stop inaccurate results and figures indicating over-voting from being uploaded to its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
“We found that the core problem of election result management and declaration in Nigeria is not even at the polling unit — it is at the collation centres,” he said.
“In 2023, there were instances of inaccurate results or results with over-voting being uploaded onto IReV. We have now devised a technical safeguard: if a result is not accurate at the polling unit, it will not go to IReV at all.
“The moment a result appears on IReV, citizens can trust what they see. By eliminating inconsistencies at the source, collation will become a transparent formality.”