Director, ICT at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Dr Lawrence Bayode has said it will clean up its voter register before December 15 to address AI-generated photographs and other irregularities identified during the display of the preliminary register,
Speaking during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Friday, Lawrence said the commission was reviewing the irregularities and expected the final register to address the problems. He also explained that INEC was using artificial intelligence (AI) for chatbots and logistics support, but not for voter registration.
“So we are working on that, we are cleaning up the register and we believe that the register that will be released on the 15th of December will have taken care of all this AI generated or other irregularity pictures that we have also seen on the register.”
He added that the commission was deploying AI chatbots to answer questions and support the movement of election materials. “Like in logistics, we are deploying chatbots where people can ask questions and the AI will respond to them, deploy it in logistics to ease our logistics movement when it comes to moving materials from one location to the other.”
Lawrence said some registration officers had introduced irregularities into the voter register because they had access to the registration system. “And this thing got into the register by the registration officers, because they have access to register people.”
He identified that the problem was not limited to locations highlighted on social media. “What we have found out is that some of these registration officers, not only the place that we are seeing even on the social media, some of them, not all of them now, some of them across the states nationwide, they have done different things to bring these irregularities onto the register.”
The ICT director said the commission had identified how some of the irregularities occurred, although he could not explain why the officers were responsible. “When the ABs 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.”
Lawrence said INEC had not deployed AI for voter registration, despite the appearance of AI-generated photographs on the preliminary register. “Even though we have not deployed AI on this voter registration, but I can tell you how this AI generated photo found its way onto the register.”
He emphasised that the commission had removed the irregularities identified by INEC and members of the public, while work continued on cleaning up the register before its final release.
“I can assure you that all these irregularities that we have seen and that the Nigerians have seen, we have removed them from the register.”
The preliminary register was displayed at registration areas from October 9 to 15. Members of the public raised concerns about suspicious photographs and other errors. “For the plenary register, we have added 9 million plus to the 93 million that was used for the 2023 general election.”
Erizia Rubyjeana
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