Microsoft to use INEC candidate list against AI deepfakes

Microsoft says it will load the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) final list of 2027 candidates into its systems so that its artificial intelligence (AI) tools cannot be used to create misleading images of them. The pledge is recorded in the outcome document of the AI and Democracy Forum (AIDF) 2026, held in Abuja.

The document lists three firm commitments from INEC, Microsoft, and the ECOWAS Network of Electoral Commissions (ECONEC). It also makes 13 recommendations to INEC, political parties, technology platforms, civil society, the media, security agencies, the judiciary and development partners.

The forum was held from 14 to 16 October 2026 under the theme “Will Algorithms Determine the 2027 Vote? Safeguarding Nigeria’s 2027 General Election in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, according to the outcome document published by Yiaga Africa.

It was jointly convened by Yiaga Africa, INEC, the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) and Dataphyte Foundation. Support came from Luminate, Microsoft, Google, TikTok, the MacArthur Foundation, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Yiaga Africa’s Executive Director, Samson Itodo, put attendance at more than 350 participants. Electoral bodies from Senegal, Liberia, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Guinea and Togo took part, the document said. The chairperson of ECONEC and of Senegal’s electoral commission, Abdoulaye Sylla, attended, INEC said.

The presidential and National Assembly elections hold on Saturday, 16 January 2027, and the governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections on Saturday, 6 February 2027.

In his keynote address on Wednesday, 14 October, the INEC Chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan, SAN, said: “Algorithms will not, and must never, decide the 2027 vote,” according to the commission.

“Algorithms may predict patterns; they may optimise routes, and they may even suggest preferences. But they do not have a conscience, they do not have a country, and they do not have a vote,” he said.

He told the forum that “the greatest threat we face is not the hacking of a ballot box, but the hacking of the voter’s mind,” INEC said. The outcome document records him describing AI as “a servant of democracy, not its master” in an election with more than 103 million registered voters and 176,846 polling units.

READ ALSO: INEC explains omission of candidates from 2027 governorship list

According to the document, INEC committed to finalising an AI governance framework for elections, adopting a binding Human Oversight Principle, deploying AI-powered cybersecurity against denial-of-service and brute-force attacks, and setting up an Electoral Information Integrity Coalition.

Under the principle, Amupitan said, no critical electoral decision on result collation, voter accreditation or candidate qualification would be fully automated or handed to an autonomous system, INEC said.

He proposed that the coalition bring together INEC, civil society organisations, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Nigeria Fact-Checking Coalition, media houses and telecommunications operators as an early-warning network against AI-generated falsehoods.

Amupitan had told a conference in Ottawa, Canada, on 10 September 2026 that the framework was undergoing internal approval, the Nigerian Tribune reported. Neither the outcome document nor INEC’s keynote statement gives a publication date for it.

Political parties were urged to sign an Ethical AI Code of Conduct, and the media to set up digital forensic desks. Security agencies and the judiciary were asked to build capacity in cybercrime investigation and digital forensics.

Also, platforms were asked to restrict and label AI-generated likenesses of candidates, remove synthetic impersonation quickly and strengthen moderation in Nigerian languages. Any AI-powered result-aggregation platform should be accurate, transparent and auditable, “recognising that only INEC has the legal authority to declare final results”, the document said.

It also warned that as synthetic media spreads, “authentic evidence may be dismissed as synthetic.”

Election GPT by Pawavox won the forum’s AI in Elections Sandbox as Judges’ Choice in the Election Observation and Data category, Yiaga Africa said. It received a N13 million cash prize and technical support to scale the tool before the elections.

The tool lets observers file geotagged, timestamped and cryptographically signed voice and video reports, and flags possibly manipulated content for human review, according to the outcome document.

One of the platforms exhibited at the event, the WaFlo Incident Board, is built by Crown Softech Ltd, an official Meta Tech Provider.