Ai On The Ballot How Artificial Intelligence Is Already Changing Polit

Co-hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer look back at the last five months of headlines as they celebrate the twentieth episode of Terms of Engagement. Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by Michelle Feldman, political director at Mobile Voting, a nonprofit, nonpartisan initiative working to make voting easier with expanded access to mobile voting. Archon Fung and Stephen Richer discuss whether fusion voting expands representation and strengthens smaller parties—or whether it muddies party lines and confuses voters. Creating a healthy digital civic infrastructure ecosystem means not just deploying technology for the sake of efficiency, but thoughtfully designing tools built to enhance democratic engagement from connection to action. Public engagement has long been too time-consuming and costly for governments to sustain, but AI offers tools to make participation more systematic and impactful. Our new Reboot Democracy Workshop Series replaces lectures with hands-on sessions that teach the practical “how-to’s” of AI-enhanced engagement.

Together with leading practitioners and partners at InnovateUS and the Allen Lab at Harvard, we’ll explore how AI can help institutions tap the collective intelligence of our communities more efficiently and effectively. The last decade taught us painful lessons about how social media can reshape democracy: misinformation spreads faster than truth, online communities harden into echo chambers, and political divisions deepen as polarization grows. Now, another wave of technology is transforming how voters learn about elections—only faster, at scale, and with far less visibility. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others, are becoming the new vessels (and sometimes, arbiters) of political information. Our research suggests their influence is already rippling through our democracy. LLMs are being adopted at a pace that makes social media uptake look slow.

At the same time, traffic to traditional news and search sites has declined. As the 2026 midterms near, more than half of Americans now have access to AI, which can be used to gather information about candidates, issues, and elections. Meanwhile, researchers and firms are exploring the use of AI to simulate polling results or to understand how to synthesize voter opinions. These models may appear neutral—politically unbiased, and merely summarizing facts from different sources found in their training data or on the internet. At the same time, they operate as black boxes, designed and trained in ways users can’t see. Researchers are actively trying to unravel the question of whose opinions LLMs reflect.

Given their immense power, prevalence, and ability to “personalize” information, these models have the potential to shape what voters believe about candidates, issues, and elections as a whole. And we don’t yet know the extent of that influence. Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate misinformation and alter the political landscape, whether by trolls on social... AI is poised to play a more volatile role than ever before in America’s next federal election in 2026. We can already see how different groups of political actors are approaching AI.

Professional campaigners are using AI to accelerate the traditional tactics of electioneering; organizers are using it to reinvent how movements are built; and citizens are using it both to express themselves and amplify their... Because there are so few rules, and so little prospect of regulatory action, around AI’s role in politics, there is no oversight of these activities, and no safeguards against the dramatic potential impacts for... Campaigners—messengers, ad buyers, fundraisers, and strategists—are focused on efficiency and optimization. To them, AI is a way to augment or even replace expensive humans who traditionally perform tasks like personalizing emails, texting donation solicitations, and deciding what platforms and audiences to target. This is an incremental evolution of the computerization of campaigning that has been underway for decades. For example, the progressive campaign infrastructure group Tech for Campaigns claims it used AI in the 2024 cycle to reduce the time spent drafting fundraising solicitations by one-third.

If AI is working well here, you won’t notice the difference between an annoying campaign solicitation written by a human staffer and an annoying one written by AI. But AI is scaling these capabilities, which is likely to make them even more ubiquitous. This will make the biggest difference for challengers to incumbents in safe seats, who see AI as both a tacitly useful tool and an attention-grabbing way to get their race into the headlines. Jason Palmer, the little-known Democratic primary challenger to Joe Biden, successfully won the American Samoa primary while extensively leveraging AI avatars for campaigning. AI Chatbots Are Shockingly Good at Political Persuasion Chatbots can measurably sway voters’ choices, new research shows.

The findings raise urgent questions about AI’s role in future elections By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Claire Cameron Stickers sit on a table during in-person absentee voting on November 01, 2024 in Little Chute, Wisconsin. Election day is Tuesday November 5. Forget door knocks and phone banks—chatbots could be the future of persuasive political campaigns. AI is eminently capable of political persuasion and could automate it at a mass scale.

We are not prepared. In January 2024, the phone rang in homes all around New Hampshire. On the other end was Joe Biden’s voice, urging Democrats to “save your vote” by skipping the primary. It sounded authentic, but it wasn’t. The call was a fake, generated by artificial intelligence. Today, the technology behind that hoax looks quaint.

Tools like OpenAI’s Sora now make it possible to create convincing synthetic videos with astonishing ease. AI can be used to fabricate messages from politicians and celebrities—even entire news clips—in minutes. The fear that elections could be overwhelmed by realistic fake media has gone mainstream—and for good reason. But that’s only half the story. The deeper threat isn’t that AI can just imitate people—it’s that it can actively persuade people. And new research published this week shows just how powerful that persuasion can be.

In two large peer-reviewed studies, AI chatbots shifted voters’ views by a substantial margin, far more than traditional political advertising tends to do. In the coming years, we will see the rise of AI that can personalize arguments, test what works, and quietly reshape political views at scale. That shift—from imitation to active persuasion—should worry us deeply. A short interaction with a chatbot can meaningfully shift a voter’s opinion about a presidential candidate or proposed policy in either direction, new Cornell research finds. The potential for artificial intelligence to affect election results is a major public concern. Two new papers – with experiments conducted in four countries – demonstrate that chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are quite effective at political persuasion, moving opposition voters’ preferences by 10 percentage points...

The LLMs’ persuasiveness comes not from being masters of psychological manipulation, but because they come up with so many claims supporting their arguments for candidates’ policy positions. “LLMs can really move people’s attitudes towards presidential candidates and policies, and they do it by providing many factual claims that support their side,” said David Rand ’04, professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences, and a senior author on both papers. “But those claims aren’t necessarily accurate – and even arguments built on accurate claims can still mislead by omission.” The researchers reported these findings Dec. 4 in two papers published simultaneously, “Persuading Voters Using Human-Artificial Intelligence Dialogues,” in Nature, and “The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational Artificial Intelligence,” in Science.

In the Nature study, Rand, along with co-senior author Gordon Pennycook, associate professor of psychology and the Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues, instructed... They randomly assigned participants to engage in a back-and-forth text conversation with a chatbot promoting one side or the other and then measured any change in the participants’ opinions and voting intentions. The researchers repeated this experiment three times: in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election. The Independent Center is using AI to identify congressional districts where independent candidates could win over the Democratic or Republican candidate. Its goal is to elect at least a handful of independents to disrupt the two-party system on Capitol Hill.

Glenn Harvey for NPR hide caption The rise of AI assistants is rewriting the rhythms of everyday life: People are feeding their blood test results into chatbots, turning to ChatGPT for advice on their love lives and leaning on AI... Now, one organization suggests artificial intelligence can go beyond making daily life more convenient. It says it's the key to reshaping American politics. "Without AI, what we're trying to do would be impossible," explained Adam Brandon, a senior adviser at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies and engages with independent voters. The goal is to elect a handful of independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using AI to identify districts where independents could succeed and uncover diamond in the rough candidates.

Instead of replacing expertise, artificial intelligence can amplify the effectiveness of skilled workers. Artificial intelligence is increasingly emerging as a key wedge issue — not between the major political parties, but within them. On the right, MAGA populists and influencers are warning about the potential hazards of unrestricted AI development as President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and their administration have pushed for minimal regulations in... On the left, progressives are fighting against potential AI-fueled job losses and a further consolidation of financial power by Big Tech as center-left Democrats weigh the unknown downsides of technological advancement with major investments... Potential 2028 presidential contenders — from Vance and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley on the right, to California Gov.

Gavin Newsom and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left — are all carving out unique lanes on the issue, creating some unusual bedfellows. Ocasio-Cortez is among the potential 2028 candidates who have highlighted growing concerns in recent weeks. Last month, she raised the potential for a market downturn fueled by what some are calling an AI bubble, warning at a congressional hearing of “2008-style threats to economic stability.”

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