# Opinion: On election day, ask your election office, not a chatbot

URL: https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/blog/opinion-on-election-day-ask-your-election-office-not-a-chatbot
Published: 2026-11-04
Author: Roman Aglaganov, Full-stack developer
Category: Opinion
Region: North America
Tags: search, safety

> Chatbots are good at many things. Telling you exactly which races are on your ballot is not yet one of them, and the cost of a mistake is a wasted or missing vote.

![Illustration: a black ballot box outline with a grey ballot paper half inserted, one checkbox marked in red](https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/api/media/file/opinion-voter-guides-1.png)

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.

## Sources

- [The Washington Post: Can you trust a chatbot to make you a voter guide? We put them to the test](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/10/24/we-asked-six-chatbots-make-voter-guides-they-made-serious-errors/)
- [Let’s Data Science: Washington Post tests six chatbots on voter guides, finds errors](https://letsdatascience.com/news/washington-post-tests-six-chatbots-on-voter-guides-finds-err-64c77967)
- [National Association of Secretaries of State: Can I Vote](https://www.nass.org/can-i-vote)