*declares November 28 for Nationwide Mock Voting
From David Onuoja, Abuja
The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Amupitan, has assured Nigerians of free, fair and credible general elections in 2027, pointing to measurable operational improvements recorded in recent off-cycle polls and new technical safeguards designed to prevent a repeat of the 2023 controversies.
Amupitan spoke on Thursday at Chatham House, London, during a high-level dialogue convened in partnership with the Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI) under the theme, “Nigeria’s 2027 Elections: Democratic Trajectory and Regional Stability Beyond the Ballot”.
He acknowledged that the controversies surrounding the 2023 presidential election severely dented public confidence in the electoral body, damage from which the Commission is still working to recover.
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“First and foremost, let me speak about what happened in 2023, which resulted in a significant trust deficit for INEC, damage so large that the Commission has not yet fully recovered from it,” he said.
He noted that since assuming office in October 2025, the Commission has treated every subsequent election as a practical laboratory to identify operational weaknesses and strengthen accreditation, voting and result management, citing the successful conduct of the Anambra and Osun governorship elections, the FCT Area Council polls, the Ekiti governorship election and 16 legislative by-elections.
“Why must Nigerians trust me? Nigerians must trust me because, number one, I have conducted off-cycle elections, and observers agree that the recent election in Osun State marked a clear improvement,” he said, adding that reforms enabled results in Anambra and Osun, which previously had histories of prolonged, inconclusive contests, to be declared the day after voting.
Highlighting insecurity, logistics and result management as INEC’s three top priorities for 2027, he revealed that the Commission’s post-2023 audit, traced the most acute result management failures to collation centres rather than polling units.
To eliminate discrepancies, he announced that INEC has built strict validation safeguards into its system so that inaccurate results or figures reflecting over-voting cannot be uploaded to the INEC 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 explained. “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”.
On the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), he announced that INEC is constructing climate-controlled storage facilities across all states to address malfunctions linked to extreme heat in 2023, has procured extra devices, and has reduced the maximum number of voters assigned per BVAS machine from 1,250 to 850.
To test the upgrades, he announced a nationwide mock accreditation and voting exercise scheduled for November 28, 2026, to simulate the presidential election and verify accreditation and electronic result transmission.
On election financing, the Chairman confirmed that while INEC has received a substantial portion of its 2027 budget, it awaits the outstanding balance for recruitment and welfare of ad hoc personnel, with assurances that the funds will be released before the end of November.
He also denied operating an X account linked to him on social media, saying a forensic review had been obtained and the matter referred to the DSS and Inspector-General of Police, and affirmed that his loyalty is solely to the Constitution and the Electoral Act.
