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By IT Edge News.Africa
As Nigeria moves towards the 2027 general elections, the biggest threat to electoral integrity may no longer come only from what happens inside polling stations. Increasingly, the battle is also being fought in cyberspace—through stolen data, compromised digital systems, deepfakes, coordinated disinformation, social-media manipulation and increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
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That reality gives new urgency to the warning delivered at the Global Conference on Responsible AI and Elections in Ottawa, Canada, where Nigeria’s electoral leadership stressed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) must strengthen electoral institutions without taking human responsibility out of the democratic process.
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For Nigeria, the message is particularly significant. As election administration, voter services, communications and results management become increasingly digital, the institutions responsible for protecting democracy must become equally e-ready.
The challenge is no longer simply acquiring technology.
It is ensuring that the people and institutions operating that technology understand its vulnerabilities, can detect attacks and manipulation, and are prepared to respond before digital threats become electoral crises.
INEC Chairman: AI Must Remain a Tool, Not the Decision-Maker
At the Ottawa conference, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan, SAN, offered a direct warning against allowing technological sophistication to overshadow institutional responsibility.
Amupitan argued that the success of AI in electoral administration would depend less on the sophistication of algorithms than on the strength of the institutions, governance structures, legal frameworks and safeguards controlling their deployment.
His position places human oversight at the centre of responsible electoral AI.
AI can analyse enormous datasets, identify anomalies, optimise logistics and assist voter services. But critical democratic decisions—including the certification of results and the exercise of electoral authority—cannot simply be delegated to machines.
For Nigeria, that distinction becomes increasingly important as technology takes on a larger role in the electoral process.
Evelyn Lewis: Nigeria Must Become E-Ready for the Next Election
Evelyn Lewis, CEO of SBTS Group, a cybersecurity and training organisation with operations spanning five continents, agrees with the INEC Chairman but believes the conversation must go beyond responsible AI governance.
For Lewis, the immediate priority is institutional e-readiness.
He argues that political parties, election officials, civil-society organisations, NGOs, election observers and other stakeholders involved in Nigeria’s democratic process must develop the awareness and technical capacity to recognise and respond to digital threats.
Elelyn Lewis
“Stakeholders in the Nigerian electoral process—whether political parties with their agents, public institutions, NGOs, and other organizations committed to free and fair elections—must kit up digitally with the awareness and right tools to stay informed and stay ahead,” Lewis said.
His warning comes at a time when election-related information can be created, manipulated and distributed at a speed that traditional institutions may struggle to match.
A false result circulating on social media, a convincing deepfake of a candidate, a compromised political-party database or a cyberattack against an election-related system can potentially create confusion long before officials have an opportunity to establish the facts.
The New Electoral Battlefield Is Digital
The modern election is no longer confined to polling stations, ballot boxes and physical campaign rallies.
It now extends across cloud platforms, mobile networks, social media, databases, messaging applications, websites and digital identity systems.
This expanded digital environment presents opportunities for more efficient election administration, but it also creates a larger attack surface.
Cybercriminals and politically motivated actors can target institutions directly, while disinformation operators can target voters psychologically.
The two threats can also reinforce each other.
A cyberattack that disrupts a legitimate information platform can be followed by fabricated information claiming to explain what happened. A manipulated video can appear alongside stolen documents to make false claims look authentic. A compromised account can be used to distribute disinformation through channels already trusted by voters.
In such an environment, cybersecurity is no longer simply an IT department responsibility.
It is an electoral integrity responsibility.
AI Can Make Election Administration Smarter
Lewis believes AI can provide significant benefits when deployed responsibly and under appropriate institutional controls.
For electoral management bodies such as INEC, AI can support several areas of election administration.
Cleaning and Protecting the Voter Register
AI can process massive datasets and identify patterns associated with duplicate registrations, suspicious records and other anomalies for further investigation.
The technology can help electoral officials focus their attention on records that require human verification instead of manually processing every data point.
Faster Results Verification
AI-assisted results management systems can compare election records, identify inconsistencies and flag unusual patterns for human examination.
The important distinction is that AI identifies the anomaly; authorised electoral officials determine what it means and what action should follow.
Smarter Election Logistics
Nigeria’s enormous geographical and logistical complexity makes election planning particularly demanding.
Data analytics can help electoral authorities anticipate voter turnout, identify locations likely to experience congestion and optimise the deployment of personnel and election materials.
Better Voter Services
AI-powered information tools could also help voters obtain timely information about registration, polling locations, voting procedures and other election-related services.
Multilingual AI systems could potentially make voter education more accessible by delivering information in a wider range of Nigerian languages.
Detecting Potential Malpractice
AI-enabled monitoring and analysis could help identify unusual patterns in publicly available information and social-media activity that may warrant investigation, including indications of coordinated intimidation, vote-buying narratives or other forms of electoral manipulation.
But again, such systems should generate alerts for trained human investigators, rather than automatically determining that an offence has occurred.
Political Campaigns Can Also Benefit From AI
AI is not only relevant to election management bodies.
Political parties and candidates are already operating in an environment where digital communication is central to campaigning.
Used responsibly, AI can help smaller or less-funded campaigns compete by reducing the cost of communications and improving their ability to engage voters.
Potential applications include hyper-localised voter communication, AI-assisted volunteer support, automated responses to voter enquiries, multilingual content creation and real-time analysis of public sentiment.
Campaign organisations can also use AI-based simulations to train canvassers and volunteers for difficult conversations with voters.
These capabilities could lower some of the traditional financial and organisational barriers to political participation.
But the same technology can also be weaponised.
The Deepfake Problem: When Seeing Is No Longer Believing
The greatest danger may arise when AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from authentic political communication.
A fabricated video showing a candidate making inflammatory remarks, a synthetic audio recording appearing to reveal a political decision or a manipulated image presented as evidence of electoral malpractice can spread to millions of people before verification catches up.
This is where digital literacy becomes as important as cybersecurity technology.
Voters, journalists, political parties, election observers and public institutions need the ability to question suspicious content, verify sources and distinguish authentic information from coordinated manipulation.
Lewis therefore sees awareness and preparedness as critical components of Nigeria’s electoral defence.
The first line of defence may not always be a sophisticated security appliance.
Sometimes, it is a trained human being who recognises that something does not look right.
The Human Firewall Against Electoral Cyber-Attacks
The phrase “human firewall” has traditionally been associated with cybersecurity awareness—the idea that trained employees can prevent attacks by recognising suspicious behaviour.
In elections, the concept takes on a much broader meaning.
Every electoral official, political-party agent, journalist, civil-society monitor and voter who can identify a phishing attempt, suspicious link, manipulated video or false claim represents another layer of protection around the democratic process.
Lewis argues that institutions must therefore move from simply acquiring technology to developing the people, processes and governance structures needed to use it safely.
That means cybersecurity awareness training, incident-response preparation, data protection, access controls, secure communications and continuous monitoring must become part of institutional election preparedness.
Aegis360AI and the Compliance Imperative
SBTS Group has invested in this emerging cybersecurity environment through Aegis360AI, an AI-native enterprise platform and multi-agentic compliance engine designed to support regulatory compliance, threat intelligence and risk management.
The broader lesson from such systems is that cybersecurity and compliance can no longer operate as disconnected functions.
As institutions become increasingly digital, they need continuous visibility into vulnerabilities, regulatory obligations and emerging threats.
For election-related organisations, this could be particularly important because sensitive voter information, operational systems and public communications may all become targets during politically sensitive periods.
Data Sovereignty Must Be Part of Electoral Security
Responsible AI also raises a fundamental question: Who controls the data and systems on which electoral AI operates?
Lewis and Amupitan’s positions converge around the need for strong institutional safeguards.
For election administration, AI systems handling sensitive electoral information should operate under clear public-sector accountability and robust data-governance arrangements.
Blind dependence on unvetted technology vendors could create additional vulnerabilities.
The issue is not an argument against private-sector technology.
Rather, it is an argument for ensuring that electoral institutions understand, control and can independently audit the critical systems on which their operations depend.
Campaign AI Needs Ethical Boundaries
Political campaigns face a different set of risks.
AI can make political communication cheaper and more efficient, but without ethical boundaries it could also make deception cheaper and more scalable.
There must therefore be a clear distinction between legitimate personalisation of campaign messages and manipulation designed to deceive voters.
AI should not become a tool for creating deceptive deepfakes, impersonating opponents, spreading fabricated claims or deploying voter-suppression tactics.
Transparency around AI-generated political content could become increasingly important as synthetic media becomes more convincing.
Human Oversight Is the Ultimate Safeguard
The central lesson emerging from Ottawa is not that AI should be kept away from elections.
It is that AI must be governed by institutions capable of controlling it.
Technology can process information faster than humans. It can identify patterns that humans might miss. It can automate repetitive tasks and improve administrative efficiency.
But it cannot assume responsibility for the democratic legitimacy of an election.
That responsibility remains human.
As Lewis puts it, critical democratic milestones—including certifying vote tallies, making final policy decisions and defending systems against cyber threats—must remain firmly in human hands.
Nigeria’s 2027 Election Will Test More Than Technology
The road to Nigeria’s 2027 general elections will therefore test more than the country’s ability to deploy digital election technologies.
It will test whether its institutions, political actors and citizens are sufficiently prepared for a digital threat environment in which cyberattacks, AI-generated misinformation and electoral manipulation can occur at machine speed.
INEC’s emphasis on responsible AI provides an important institutional starting point.
But the responsibility cannot rest with INEC alone.
Political parties must secure their systems and train their agents. Public institutions must strengthen cybersecurity preparedness. Civil-society organisations and election observers must develop digital verification capabilities. Journalists must improve their ability to detect synthetic content. And voters must become more digitally discerning.
The defence of democracy is consequently becoming a shared digital responsibility.
The ballot box remains at the centre of the democratic process—but the security perimeter around it now extends deep into cyberspace.
And in that environment, the strongest firewall may ultimately be neither an algorithm nor a security appliance.
It is an informed, vigilant and digitally prepared human being.
COVER PHOTO: BBC
