INEC Chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan, has announced that the commission will hold a nationwide mock accreditation and voting exercise on November 28 to test its upgraded technology ahead of the 2027 elections. He also said INEC will obey any final court judgment on whether Atiku Abubakar can contest the presidential election.
Amupitan spoke on Thursday at a dialogue organised by the Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI) at Chatham House in London. The presidential and National Assembly elections are scheduled for January 16, 2027, while governorship and State House of Assembly polls will follow on February 6, 2027.
On the dispute over Atiku’s ticket, the INEC chairman pointed to the Constitution. “I’m obligated under Section 285 of the Constitution of Nigeria to obey every court order,” he said. A Federal High Court recently nullified the David Mark-led ADC leadership, a ruling that put Atiku’s candidacy under the party in doubt. The ADC is appealing.
Amupitan said INEC is dealing with more than 300 pending court cases. According to him, enforcing last-minute rulings turns the commission into the target of public anger. “You become the problem,” he said, as he called for reforms that would require pre-election disputes to be settled six months to a year before polling day.
On the mock exercise, he said it will test the accreditation system and the electronic transmission of results. INEC has added a safeguard so that results found to be inaccurate at the polling unit will not be uploaded to the IReV portal, and figures showing over-voting will also be blocked.
The commission has also cut the maximum number of voters assigned to each BVAS device from 1,250 to 850, with extra devices for polling units that exceed that number. Amupitan added that INEC is building climate-controlled storage facilities in the states to prevent the heat-related malfunctions recorded in 2023.
He admitted that a trust deficit remains and that INEC has not fully recovered from the 2023 elections. He named insecurity, logistics and result management as the commission’s three main priorities for 2027, and said the main weaknesses in result management are at collation centres rather than polling units.
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