By Roman Aglaganov
Today is election day in the United States, and many voters will look up what is on their ballot at the last minute. More and more of them will ask a chatbot. A National Conference on Citizenship survey found that two in five Americans have used AI to look up election information. My advice for today is simple: don’t rely on it for the details that decide your vote.
The evidence
Last month The Washington Post asked six popular chatbots to build voter guides for addresses in every US county. They made frequent, serious errors. One guide listed a Missouri Senate race that does not exist; another named a candidate for the US House in Washington who is not on the ballot. Part of the problem was upstream: the Post found AI-built websites feeding the chatbots bad information, so a chatbot citing a source is no guarantee the source is right.
This is not a story about malice. Ballots are a worst case for today’s AI: thousands of local races, district lines that split streets, last-minute withdrawals, and very little room for error. A chatbot that is right 90% of the time is impressive in general and useless for telling you which school board candidates you can vote for.
What to use instead
Your state or county election office publishes your sample ballot and polling place, and the National Association of Secretaries of State’s Can I Vote site links to each state’s official tools. Use those for the facts: where, when, which races and which candidates. If you want a chatbot’s help to understand a ballot measure or compare positions, it can be a useful starting point, but check what it says against the measure’s official text and the candidates’ own statements.
What the companies should do
AI companies have spent months promising election safeguards. The most useful one is humility: when asked about a specific ballot, a chatbot should say plainly that it may be wrong and send people to the official source, rather than producing a confident, personalised guide. That should be the default before an election, not a fix after someone points out the errors.
