Candidate Nomination Portal: INEC Should Stop Putting Political Parties to the Test
Updated on : Thursday, 16 July, 2026
Released on: Saturday, 11 July, 2026
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The BOOT Party's Experience with the Portal
The BOOT Party's experience with the INEC Candidate Nomination Portal highlights both the promise and the shortcomings of electoral technology in Nigeria. While we ultimately succeeded in uploading our candidates for the Presidential and National Assembly elections, the process was unnecessarily difficult due to technical limitations and system vulnerabilities that turned what should have been a straightforward administrative exercise into a time-consuming and exhausting ordeal.
Candidate Nomination Should Be a Verification Process, Not a Data Matching Exercise
Following the conclusion of party primaries, INEC compiles the list of candidates who emerged from the monitored primaries and uploads those details into its Candidate Nomination Portal. Political parties are then required to manually enter the details of the very same candidates into the portal. The system compares the party's entries with the data previously uploaded by INEC, and only where there is an exact match is the party permitted to complete the nomination process.
The difficulty is that political parties cannot view the candidate data already uploaded by INEC for comparison while entering their own submissions. Consequently, even minor differences in the spelling, arrangement, or formatting of names can result in a "no match" error, preventing the submission of a candidate's nomination. In many cases, political parties understandably assumed that INEC had altered or incorrectly recorded their candidates' names because they had no visibility into the Commission's records to determine the source of the mismatch.
INEC's Responsive Intervention
To INEC's credit, after we formally communicated our concerns to the Commission, the Chairman approved dedicated technical support for the BOOT Party, which helped address the immediate challenges we encountered. We appreciate that responsiveness. However, the real objective should be a robust, user-friendly, and reliable Candidate Nomination Portal that works seamlessly for every political party without the need for special intervention.
Lessons for Electoral Technology in 2027
Our experience points to several practical lessons for the deployment of electoral technology before, during, and after the 2027 general elections.
The candidate nomination process should be fundamentally redesigned. Political parties should upload the details of their duly nominated candidates directly onto the portal, while INEC's responsibility should be to validate those submissions against its records of monitored and certified primaries.
Replace Data Re-Entry and WhatsApp with Data Validation
Under the current arrangement, political parties are unable to view or compare the candidate information already held by INEC while entering data into the Candidate Nomination Portal. As a result, even minor differences in spelling, name sequencing, or formatting can trigger data mismatches. Based on our experience since the 2023 general elections, these mismatches have occurred consistently, creating avoidable administrative challenges for political parties.
More concerning is the requirement for parties to first submit candidates' information to INEC through personnel's personal WhatsApp accounts before manually entering the same information into the Candidate Nomination Portal. Beyond the inefficiency of this duplication, the practice raises legitimate data protection and information security concerns that require urgent review.
In a country as diverse as Nigeria, where legitimate variations in names and naming conventions are common, such discrepancies should be anticipated and managed through intelligent system design rather than treated as errors requiring repeated manual correction. This places an unnecessary administrative burden on political parties and transforms what should be a straightforward nomination exercise into a time-consuming process of resolving avoidable inconsistencies.
Candidate nomination should be a validation process, not an administrative test of a political party's ability to reconcile data it cannot see.
Strengthening Communication and Technical Support
Communication between INEC and political parties during nomination periods must also improve. INEC should establish a dedicated feedback and support portal for political parties. Dedicated, professional technical support channels should be available throughout statutory submission periods, when time is of the essence and delays can have legal consequences.
More broadly, technology should be deployed to enhance transparency, efficiency, and public confidence throughout the electoral process—not only during candidate nominations, but also in voter accreditation, result management, and post-election auditing. Digital systems must be reliable, secure, and designed to simplify electoral administration rather than create additional obstacles. Ultimately, well-designed digital systems reduce administrative errors, improve institutional efficiency, and strengthen public confidence in electoral outcomes.
A Constructive Path Forward
The BOOT Party recognises the vital constitutional role of INEC and acknowledges the Commission's continued efforts to strengthen Nigeria's electoral process. Our recommendations are offered in the spirit of constructive engagement and institutional improvement. We are confident that, through sustained investment in resilient digital infrastructure, improved process design, and continuous engagement with political parties, INEC can build a more efficient, transparent, and trusted electoral system for the 2027 general elections.
Yours sincerely,
Sonny Adenuga
National Chairman
Because Of Our Tomorrow (BOOT) Party
@SonnyAdenuga
Signed
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