Nigerians held INEC Chairman Amupitan down in England for registering fake voters on the INEC portal

Nigerian protesters in the United Kingdom on Thursday surrounded the vehicle conveying the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Joash Amupitan, outside Chatham House in London, demanding his resignation over alleged irregularities in the preliminary voter register for the 2027 general elections. Amupitan had arrived at the institute for a high-level dialogue on Nigeria’s preparations for the 2027 elections, organised with the Kimpact Development Initiative, but he was met by a crowd of mostly young Nigerians carrying placards and chanting against the commission. The protesters accused INEC of compromising its independence and favouring President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), pointing to images circulating on social media allegedly showing duplicate registrations, ghost polling units, deceased voters still listed, and AI-generated faces on voter cards. The protest came just days after INEC itself confirmed problems in the register, as Amupitan disclosed on 9 November that the Commission had deleted 1,608,660 invalid registrations after auditing the 2025/2026 Continuous Voter Registration exercise, plus 873 records of verified dead persons, making a total of 1,609,553 entries removed, while 54 persons across 10 states had been identified for multiple registrations, photo substitution and other violations and would face prosecution. INEC has however maintained that some of the questionable entries circulating online are from old registrations dating back as far as 2011, and not necessarily from the new exercise, with the final voters’ register expected on 15 December 2026. Speaking inside the dialogue, Amupitan urged Nigerians to trust his leadership, assuring them of free, fair, credible and inclusive elections in 2027, while acknowledging that the technical glitches recorded during the 2023 general election had damaged public confidence. He assured the audience that measures had been introduced to prevent inaccurate polling unit results from appearing on the INEC Result Viewing Portal, IReV, in 2027, and INEC has fixed a nationwide mock accreditation and voting exercise for 28 November 2026. The 2027 presidential and National Assembly elections are scheduled for 16 January 2027, while governorship and State Assembly elections will follow on 6 February 2027.