The chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Joash Amupitan, has acknowledged that inaccurate results were uploaded to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in the 2023 general election, saying the challenge lay in result management at collation centres.

Mr Amupitan spoke on Thursday in London, during a high-level dialogue themed ‘Nigeria’s 2027 Elections: Democratic Trajectory and Regional Stability Beyond the Ballot’.

He said the controversies surrounding the 2023 general election resulted in a significant trust deficit for INEC, stressing that it has been damaged so much that the commission has not yet recovered.

“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 said. “In 2023, there were instances of inaccurate results or results with over-voting being uploaded onto IReV.”

He said INEC has built strict validation safeguards into its system to ensure that inaccurate results or figures cannot be uploaded to the IReV.

“If a result is not accurate at the polling unit, it will not go to IReV at all,” he stated.

Mr Amupitan, however, urged Nigerians to trust his leadership to deliver free, fair and credible general elections in 2027.

He noted that since assuming office in October 2025, the commission had treated every subsequent election as a practical laboratory for identifying operational weaknesses and strengthening accreditation, voting and result management.

Mr Amupitan cited the Anambra and Osun governorship elections, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Area Council elections, the Ekiti governorship election, and 16 legislative by-elections.

“Nigerians must trust me because I have conducted off-cycle elections, and observers agree that the recent election in Osun State marked a clear improvement,” he said.

He clarified that Anambra and Osun previously had histories of prolonged and inconclusive elections, and results in both states were declared a day after the voting under his leadership.

Mr Amupitan disclosed that although INEC considered introducing an entirely new electoral technology for 2027, it opted to upgrade and harden its existing infrastructure because of the tight operational timeline before the polls.

He said INEC is constructing climate-controlled storage facilities in all states to resolve the malfunctioning of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) linked to extreme heat and storage conditions in 2023.

Mr Amupitan added that the commission has procured extra devices and reduced the maximum number of voters assigned to each BVAS machine from 1,250 to 850.

He urged Nigerian youths to remain actively involved in the democratic process and to guard against disinformation.