Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) already requires human checks for some election-related artificial intelligence, as Yiaga Africa scheduled an Abuja forum on synthetic media ahead of the 2027 vote.
Yiaga Africa’s announcement listed Oct. 14-15 for its AI and Democracy Forum, which was set to examine synthetic media and disinformation. The listed partners included INEC, Microsoft, TikTok and civil society organizations. Ahead of the forum, Yiaga Africa Executive Director Samson Itodo described deepfakes and AI-powered campaigns as “no longer hypothetical risks” and called for scrutiny of election AI governance, audits and accountability.
INEC’s Artificial Intelligence Division predates the forum. An International IDEA case study developed with electoral authorities dates the unit’s formation to May 2025 within INEC’s ICT Department. The study describes its responsibilities as centralizing AI governance, coordinating technology investments and building expertise for AI projects.
INEC’s election technology policy, effective Sept. 25, 2025, covers AI used for voter accreditation, election monitoring and result collation. It calls for testing and human verification, and makes commission approval of a report after a pilot a condition for nationwide deployment. The policy’s human-verification requirements were covered previously by EconoTimes.
International IDEA says INEC uses AI to flag suspected duplicate voter registrations for staff review and is deploying it to identify discrepancies in polling-unit results. The case study links a 2023 failure to upload presidential results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) to a back-end configuration error.
On Oct. 15, Yiaga Africa named Election GPT by Pawavox the Judges’ Choice Winner in the Election Observation and Data category. The organization said the team would receive a 13 million naira cash prize and technical support for a proposed tool to verify election observers’ reports. Its planned media-detection feature depends on a proposed integration with TrueMedia and would flag material for human review; the award announcement did not say INEC had adopted the tool.
The next formal step under INEC’s policy is commission approval of a report after a pilot before nationwide rollout. The policy gives no date for that review.
