The Independent National Electoral Commission has blamed some registration officers for the appearance of suspected artificial intelligence-generated photographs and other irregularities in the preliminary register of voters.
INEC’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, Dr Lawrence Bayode, disclosed this on Friday during an interview on Arise Television.
Bayode said the commission discovered the irregularities after subjecting the voter register to its Automated Biometric Identification System.
According to him, some registration officers across the country allegedly used their login credentials to introduce questionable records into the commission’s database. 
“We have registration officers on the field. And these registration officers, they have login details to log into the system.
“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,” he said.
Bayode explained that while some of the suspicious photographs were AI-generated, others were the result of poor registration practices.
“Some of these pictures are AI-generated. Some of them not 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,” he added.
The ICT director said INEC had been able to identify the affected records and determine how some of the irregularities occurred, although he said the commission was yet to establish the reasons behind the actions of the officers involved.
“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,” Bayode said.
He said INEC had commenced efforts to clean up the voter register even before releasing the preliminary version to the public.
Bayode added that the commission was under pressure to complete the cleaning process within the statutory 90-day period provided for the exercise.
The disclosure comes amid concerns over suspicious photographs and other irregularities spotted after INEC uploaded its preliminary register of voters on its website on October 26.
As previously reported by The PUNCH, screenshots circulating on social media showed photographs suspected to have been generated with AI attached to voter records in parts of Edo State.
Other complaints included alleged duplicate voter entries and claims by some registered voters that their details were missing from the online register.
INEC had earlier explained that the online register was the same preliminary register physically displayed at Registration Areas nationwide from October 9 to 15 as part of the Display, Claims and Objections exercise.
