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Before elections in the United Kingdom, authorities cross-reference their voter register with weekly death declarations from the General Register Office. Similarly, the United States use Social Security death master files to filter their voter register before elections.
In Scandinavian countries like Sweden, the moment a hospital issues a death certificate, a centralised population database instantly revokes the voter eligibility of such a citizen. In fact, citizens’ voting rights are not determined until 30 days before election day. This happens after they consult the Swedish Population Register.
But things seem different in Nigeria. Sections 12 and 19 of the Nigerian Electoral Act explicitly ask the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to continuously maintain, clean, and purge the National Register of Voters of deceased persons, duplicates, and underage registrants.
However, with less than two months to the 2027 election, the dead are still eligible to participate in Nigerian elections regardless of the year they passed.
As the 2027 election approaches, social media users have started questioning whether INEC is following its mandate following the delayed Voter register upload and AI images found in the register.
Afterwards, some users started checking their deceased relatives’ names on the INEC voter portal and found them active.
DUBAWA conducted a similar test using public data on some deceased public figures. We checked for the late President Muhammadu Buhari and the late Ondo State Governor Rotimi Akeredolu. While Buhari passed in July 2025, Rotimi passed in December 2023. But we found that both are still appearing on the INEC preliminary voter register in their respective wards in Katsina and Ondo State. These are just two out of several Nigerians who have died since the 2023 election cycle.
So is Nigeria about to conduct another election where names of the deceased are competing in the same space as the living?
Previously, some Nigerians thought everyone who wants to vote had to re-register before each new election cycle, but INEC clarified this misconception in 2022. The commission noted that Nigeria operates a Permanent Voter Register system, so registered Nigerians do not need to register again, as their cards remain valid for future elections.
This means you can only register with INEC once in a lifetime. Once INEC captures your biometrics and issues your Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC), your data is locked in the national database indefinitely. So, whether you registered in 2011, 2019, or 2023, you are expected to use the same card you received in 2027 and beyond.
While this arguably saves living voters the stress of queuing every four years, it has created a gateway for the deceased to remain on the voter register.
Now, the question is: “Will dead people be featured in the 2027 election?”
The short answer is yes. But the long answer is a bit more complex than it appears.
Unregistered deaths: a challenge to voter register cleanup
This issue of the voter register being littered with the details of deceased persons is not a new problem. In fact, Nigerians have called out INEC several times to address it.
On Jan. 1, 2022, Punch newspaper published a news article titled “Why we can’t remove dead persons from voter register – INEC.”
In that story, Festus Okoye, the then INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, said INEC could not remove the names of dead persons from the voter register because Nigeria did not have data on births and deaths to rely on to expunge the names of/ such individuals.
In line with this, the National Population Commission (NPC) also raised concerns in July 2026 about the country’s low civil registration coverage. The commission revealed that only 57 per cent of births and less than 20 per cent of deaths are officially registered in the country.
In February 2026, INEC acknowledged the ongoing concerns about deceased persons and duplicate records on the register. The commission then announced that INEC would carry out a Nationwide voter revalidation exercise to sanitise its database ahead of the 2027 elections.
According to The Cable, the exercise was supposed to “begin at the LGA level from April 13 to May 2, 2026, before moving to the registration area (RA) level from May 5 to May 11, and subsequently to polling units (PUs) from May 13 to May 19.”
On March 30, 2026, INEC held a training-of-trainers (ToT) workshop at the Electoral Institute (TEI) to prepare officials for the exercise.
Kunle Ajayi, chairman of the institute’s board, said the exercise was “critical to ensure the integrity of the register ahead of the 2027 general election.”
But on April 10, 2026, INEC made a U-turn and said it would no longer conduct the revalidation exercise until after the 2027 general election.
Amupitan later explained that INEC decided to discontinue the revalidation plan because of time constraints, and many Nigerians, especially from opposition parties, had opposed it.
According to Premium Times, the opposition said INEC wanted to use the revalidation exercise as “a ploy to disenfranchise millions of Nigerians.”
What this means for the 2027 elections
With less than 80 days to the general elections, INEC announced that over 103 million people are eligible to vote based on the current register.
But with INEC’s voter register still littered with an unknown number of deceased names, the 103 million figure becomes misleading. This number may also end up skewing the post-voting analysis. For example, after voting, journalists, civil society organisations, election analysts, and even INEC itself would release figures like ratios of registered voters to actual voter turnout. However, since the baseline figure from the INEC register is not clean, those data would be questionable.
Supporting DUBAWA’s analysis, political analyst Jide Ojo argued that Nigeria’s voter register already has flaws that could affect research and post-election analysis, particularly turnout calculations.
“The voter turnout will still be calculated based on 103 million, when we know that some of those people have died, some have relocated abroad, and some, as we have come to realise, are AI-generated. The voter turnout we are now going to be dealing with for research will be based on speculation or postulation,” Jide said.
Jide added that using the 103 million registered-voter figure as the baseline for such calculations could produce misleading interpretations if the register still contains the names of deceased persons and Nigerians who have relocated abroad.
He also said an unreliable register could affect certain election-related decisions, particularly where the law requires specific geographical thresholds or where the margin of victory must be compared with the number of voters affected by disruptions.
“When an election is quite competitive, you know the law says for a presidential election, for instance, you must score 25% of the votes in two-thirds of Nigeria. So, when you are making those calculations, and you are basing it on a flawed register, it can affect that calculation,” he said.
Oge Udegbunam, Program Lead at Abuja School of Social and Political Thought, explained that the absence of a comprehensive death-registration system in Nigeria makes it difficult to determine how many deceased persons remain on INEC’s voter register.
She noted that without reliable death records, it would be difficult to establish the actual number of living registered voters and consequently calculate voter apathy accurately.
“If, for example, we know people who have died or there is a register somewhere that says these people have died, it will still be difficult to determine how many people in a particular polling unit are alive and how many have died. We don’t have that data or resource to know the number of people who are alive and those who have died in the past four years,” she said.
Oge also said the presence of deceased persons on the voter register could undermine public confidence in INEC and the electoral process.
She said the inability to remove deceased persons from the register could raise suspicions that political parties might exploit outdated figures to manipulate election results. She added that the problem could deepen existing public doubts about whether votes would count and whether elections would be conducted credibly.
“People will begin to think that some political parties may want to leverage those numbers to rig elections. However, I think rigging would be very difficult in the 2027 general elections because technology is now in place and Nigerians are more aware,” Oge said.