The Independent National Electoral Commission has announced that political parties will receive access codes for the official Candidate Nomination Portal on June 26, 2026, enabling them to upload the names, credentials, and required particulars of their primary election winners as the commission moves the 2027 electoral process from the primary elections phase into the formal candidate submission stage.
Chairman Joash Amupitan, addressing party leaders and representatives at the commission’s second quarterly consultative meeting in Abuja, said the portal was fully automated and would close at the expiry of the prescribed submission period without extension, urging all parties to ensure that their relevant officers and technical personnel were fully prepared and that all nominations were submitted well in advance of the deadline.
The announcement came against the backdrop of two conflicting Federal High Court judgments that had challenged different aspects of the commission’s timetable for 2027 general election activities, creating a legal uncertainty that Amupitan said INEC had moved to resolve through the appeals process. He said the commission had filed appeals against both decisions and taken the necessary procedural steps to obtain authoritative rulings from appellate courts before the uncertainty could materially disrupt election preparation.
His defense of the timetable was substantive. The commission’s position, he said, was that the activities contained in the timetable were not independent items that could be arbitrarily invalidated but interrelated operational processes whose internal sequencing and collective coherence were essential to orderly and credible elections. The Electoral Act prescribed timelines for some activities but left others, including the submission and verification of party membership registers, the monitoring of primaries, and the pre-upload of primary results as accountability mechanisms, to the commission’s operational discretion. Removing those activities from the timetable without providing alternative coordination mechanisms would not simplify the electoral process but would create the kind of operational chaos in which manipulation and dispute thrived.
Amupitan said INEC had carefully reviewed both judgments, respected the judicial process, and taken the legally appropriate steps to seek clarity at the appellate level while continuing to operate its own preparations on the assumption that the courts would ultimately affirm the commission’s constitutional responsibility to organize the election in a coherent and transparent manner.
On preparations for the June 20 Ekiti governorship election, Amupitan said he had personally led a high-level assessment delegation to the state and found preparations progressing satisfactorily. The voter register contained 1,059,360 registered voters after the addition of 66,664 newly registered citizens and the removal of 2,103 confirmed double registrations. All 2,445 polling units across the state’s 16 local government areas were committed to open simultaneously at 8:30 a.m. on election day, with logistics, technology deployment, and training of election officials all proceeding on schedule.
Inter-Party Advisory Council National Chairman Dr. Yusuf Dantalle said the 27 years Nigeria had spent under uninterrupted constitutional democracy created a reasonable expectation that its electoral institutions, legal frameworks, and political culture would have matured sufficiently to produce elections characterized by genuine transparency, meaningful competition, and outcomes that reflected the authentic preferences of voters. He said the integrity of internal party processes was the foundation on which the integrity of elections rested, and that parties had a responsibility to approach candidate selection with the same commitment to fairness they expected the commission to apply on election day.
