I told this story wrong for two years, and once I told it from a stage.
The story sounded responsible. Do not ask a chatbot about voting, I said, because it will invent things — a registration deadline that has passed, a polling place that closed in 2019, an ID rule no state actually has. And I had a study to wave at: in May 2024, researchers put 216 questions to five Google and OpenAI models and found they gave incorrect information 27% of the time, in fieldwork run between May 21 and May 31 that year. Worse than one answer in four.
So I kept saying it — through 2025, into 2026, same warning, same number, same confident pause before the punchline. What I never did was go back and re-run the test.
Then this spring, someone close to me — the kind who votes in every election and reads the whole voter guide — asked her phone where she was supposed to vote, in front of me, partly to make a point. The answer came back in four seconds, plainly written, and as far as I could check, correct. I had spent two years arming myself for a fight that was already over.
What took me until this summer to see is what the answer did not contain. Not one word about who runs her election — no county office, no state website, no human being with a statutory duty and a public meeting schedule. A correct answer, from a system that will never be accountable for it, given to a voter I had trained to check for the one defect it did not have.
That is the story I told wrong. The number was real. I just kept telling the accuracy story long after accuracy stopped being the interesting part.
The date, and the honest version of "everyone does this now"
The general election is November 3, 2026, General Election — and I want to be careful here, because this is where writers reach for a statistic they do not have.
I cannot tell you 2026 is the first federal election in which Americans ask AI assistants about voting at scale; nobody has published a US usage figure I would defend. What is documented is narrower. The Reuters Digital News Report found 7% of audiences in 48 countries surveyed now use AI to get their news every week. American voters describe chatbot research as a substitute for reading they used to do — one Los Angeles voter's explanation was simply "I don't have the time". And campaigns now buy software that runs AI chats in real browser sessions to learn what the machines are saying about them.
A behavior change, then, not a measured first. It is enough.
Two rounds, six states, and the number that went away
The study that undid my talking point comes from the States United Democracy Center. Its design is the point: the same audit, run twice, months apart.
The preliminary round, in September and October 2025, collected 216 Google AI responses and 281 ChatGPT responses across six states — Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In it, 6.9% of the Google AI answers and 8.2% of the ChatGPT answers contained verifiable factual errors. The second round, in January and February 2026, gathered 402 more, and in that round no responses were coded as inaccurate on any platform condition.
Hold the scoping, because it is not what a headline would say: that is a coding result, on a finite question set, in one window — January and February 2026 — inside a study of nearly 1,000 responses. Not a property the models now permanently possess. But measured, and the direction of travel. The thing I had warned people about had stopped happening.
Ask an assistant who is running for governor and you are asking a checkable question: there is a filing list, at a state office, with names on it. In the second round, ChatGPT returned incomplete lists of current gubernatorial primary race candidates 88.9% of the time it was queried — 88.9% of the gubernatorial candidate queries, note, not of the races. Google's summaries, in incognito conditions, were incomplete on 42.9% of the attorney general and secretary of state queries.
Nothing there is a lie. Every name returned was a real candidate. The ballot was simply smaller than the ballot.
Then the routing. ChatGPT mentioned the voter's own state election site in 39.4% of its responses — six times in ten, it answered without saying where the authoritative version lives. Google's figure was better, at 55.6%, until it wasn't: on or around February 2, 2026, mid-collection, Google AI began returning only links to election-related queries instead of written summaries. That 55.6% is the pre-change number. After the format change, the report says, it dropped to 0%. Nobody legislated that; nobody announced it.
The report's three-part conclusion is what I wish I had been reading from that stage instead of my 2024 number: the platforms are "incomplete substitutes for official election information", inconsistent in directing voters to authoritative state sources, and vulnerable to format changes driven, in part, by commercial pressure.
That last clause is the uncomfortable one, and the report says it plainly: links-only responses send users to third-party websites, which generate click-through traffic and advertising revenue in a way a self-contained summary does not. The format that stopped naming the clerk also monetizes better.
One sourcing detail stuck: Wikipedia alone accounted for 429 of the cited sources, 12.3% of all the links the two systems produced. States United's Michael Pomante locates the failure there rather than in the models' honesty — the platforms often "rely on crowdsourced websites rather than authoritative sources". And Thania Sanchez, a former ACLU analytics director now at States United, framed the stakes as participation rather than deception: turning to AI for election information, she said, "poses significant risks."
Three good reasons to tell me I am overreacting
Let me argue the other side properly.
The assistants are genuinely good at procedure. An academic audit at University College Dublin put 194 election questions to four chatbots, twice, before Ireland's May 2026 byelections. Most of the answers, the researchers said, were good — and their framing deserves quoting against me: where the systems reach clear and reliable information, such as government guidance on polling locations, "these systems can serve users well". Their candidate finding was the American shape, mind you — ChatGPT left at least six names off the ballot — but "when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong" describes a tail, not a mean.
Maybe omission is the small problem. Research covered in December 2025 found Trump supporters who chatted with a model favoring Kamala Harris moving 3.9 points toward her on a 100-point scale — and that as the models became more persuasive, they increasingly provided misleading or false information. The authors hedge it themselves: the exact contours of the impact remain to be seen. But persuasion and omission point at the same fact — the assistant is a channel now, and channels shape.
A link is a link. When Google returns only links, it is arguably routing better than any summary did. Except the share naming an official state election site went to zero. If you cannot tell a voter which office administers their election, you have not routed them; you have delegated.
None of that touches the core problem. We built an enormous apparatus for detecting when a machine says something false, and none at all for noticing when a machine says something true and stops.
Brazil already wrote the rule. It wrote it about the other failure.
One country has already done what Americans are still arguing about — passed a binding rule on what an AI assistant may say to a voter — and it still did not solve this.
Brazil's constitutional design helps. There, electoral management is done through the judicial system: the Superior Electoral Court, the TSE, is a court that also administers elections and writes the regulations — powers no American election official has. It used them in a package of 14 resolutions published in March 2026, ahead of the October vote.
The rule is Resolution nº 23.755, adopted March 2, 2026 and published two days later, Minister Nunes Marques as rapporteur. Its Article 28 §1º-C forbids providers of AI systems from ranking, recommending, suggesting or prioritizing candidates, parties, federations or coalitions — "ainda que solicitado pela(o) usuária(o)", even when the user asks. A second limb bans opinions, stated electoral preferences and vote recommendations, including through automated responses — the stated purpose being to prevent algorithmic interference in how a voter makes up their mind.
Now read it for what is not there. I searched the resolution's full text for any obligation on an AI provider to direct users to official Electoral Justice information. There is none. Brazil's rule tells the assistants what not to say and says nothing about where it must send you. The most aggressive AI election rule on the planet regulates the opinion failure and leaves the omission failure untouched — same blind spot, opposite hemisphere. Analysts flag an adjacent gap: the rules concentrate enforcement on distribution platforms and say almost nothing about the companies that build the AI systems.
The enforcement machinery is real, and running today. A later TSE ordinance set this very date as the deadline: platforms had "até o dia 16 de agosto" — until August 16, 2026 — to submit their compliance plans, on pain of losing the accreditation needed to sell electoral advertising services. The duty is anticipatory: firms must anticipate electoral violations involving generative AI rather than react after harm. Brazilian civil society is not starry-eyed about it — one advocate warned of "o risco de que sejam planos genéricos," a real risk the plans come back generic.
Did the rule change behavior? In April 2026, a month after the resolution, testers found the main chatbots available in Brazil "continuam ranqueando, recomendando e emitindo opiniões" about presidential pre-candidates — still ranking, still recommending, still opining. Five tools were tested between April 6 and 10, and four of the five recommended candidates from inputs like gender, age, region and ideological position. Two hedges travel with that: the tests ran before the official campaign period began, and the Observatório IA nas Eleições — a Data Privacy Brasil and Aláfia Lab project — expressly does not present its findings as consummated infractions. Observed responses warranting attention, not adjudicated violations.
The relationship has moved since. In March, the election lawyer Fernando Neisser said of the TSE's platform pacts that "that does not yet exist with OpenAI, for example." On July 16, 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic and ElevenLabs formally joined the Permanent Programme to Combat Disinformation through adhesion agreements signed in Brasília — with the caveat, from the same reporting, that the TSE has not published the full legal text of those agreements. Brazil finds out first: first round October 4, 2026, nearly 159 million people eligible.
Now run the clock forward
Picture 2030. The assistant does not tell you where to vote; it handles it. It notices you moved, updates your registration, orders the mail ballot, and reads you a summary of the seven names on your ballot while you make coffee. Not fantasy — the obvious product roadmap, and much of it genuinely good.
Now picture the same morning going wrong. The summary lists five of the seven, because a filing page updated Thursday and the index refreshed Sunday. You never see the omission, because an omission has no edges: no false statement to fact-check, no screenshot to circulate, no correction to demand. And when you look for someone to complain to, there is nobody. The county clerk did not write it, the state did not approve it, and the company will tell you, accurately, that everything it said was true.
Here is what I keep turning over. Brazil banned assistants from ranking candidates, even on request, because ranking shapes a decision. A system that consistently returns an incomplete list produces something close to the same effect without ever expressing a preference. If the last mile of civic information runs through a private product, the ballot in your head becomes whatever the index happened to hold that morning, and no rule anywhere is written against that.
The experts asked for exactly this, in writing, and did not get it
None of this was an unknown risk, which is the most deflating part of the file. In March 2024, a Brookings Institution team advising state election officials wrote that officials should "ensure that chatbots direct users to authoritative and reliable sources". That is the recommendation. The 2026 data is a measurement of it not happening.
The Brennan Center for Justice got there earlier, warning in 2023 that the danger in voter-facing chatbots was "delivering incorrect information presented as fact" — advice aimed at election offices deploying AI, not at the general-purpose assistant in your pocket, which is where the traffic went.
Now the other side, because "make them link to the clerk" is not a free lunch. Writing in January 2026, R Street's Chris McIsaac argued that important questions remain about the effectiveness and constitutionality of the restrictions states have rushed to pass, and that the trend reflects "a concerning impulse by lawmakers to control speech" rather than cultivating counterspeech. That objection has teeth: compelling a private company to print a government website in its output is a compelled-speech question.
But look at what the existing laws actually do. Thirty-one states had passed laws regulating election-related AI deepfake videos as of late June, per the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the laws in Hawaii and California each struck down by courts as violating the First Amendment, bringing the total to 29. Trackers describe the same pattern: disclosure regimes requiring disclaimers to viewers that manipulated content is not real. Every one targets a fake. Not one addresses an answer that is entirely true and quietly incomplete.
The platforms are doing something. Tech Policy Press describes OpenAI leaning on web search with source links, Anthropic adding banners to external TurboVote resources, Google promising direct links to official resources — and a verdict that is itself a hedge: "it would be ideal to see well-developed and carefully implemented solutions" from all major players at this stage. Election officials largely urge caution, though some see opportunity: Ohio's secretary of state built an internal assistant on the office's own manual, for election officials and pointedly not the public, while Minnesota's Steve Simon says the most trusted source is the people who administer elections. The Election Assistance Commission is colder still, warning that dates, hours and locations require a higher degree of accuracy than many AI tools can currently provide.
What does this mean for you?
You will use the assistant. I will too. So use it in the shape that survives its actual failure mode.
Ask the second question, always. After the answer, type: "Who administers elections in my county, and what is the official website?" You are no longer testing the facts — you are testing whether it will hand you off.
Verify the thing it is worst at. Candidate lists. The incompleteness rates are highest exactly where the stakes are, and the fix is one visit to your state's filing page — which is also States United's blunt advice to voters.
Bookmark the neutral front door. Can I Vote was created by state election officials, captures no information about you, and links directly to state election websites — the routing job the assistants do inconsistently.
Notice the format, not just the content. If a summary becomes a list of links, that is a product decision, and the report ties links-only formats in part to click-through traffic and advertising revenue. Neither format owes you a clerk.
Put the date in your own calendar. November 3, 2026. Registration deadlines are state-specific and unforgiving — California's page sets its last day at October 19, 2026, and yours will differ.
Watch for the mirror. Reporting on voters researching candidates by chatbot warns the tools are far from foolproof and tend to mirror the user's own framing. If an answer flatters your priors perfectly, that is a signal, not a service.
The correction I owe that room
The warning I gave for two years was a good warning about 2024. Its shelf life ran out, and I did not check the label.
What replaced it is harder to deliver from a stage, because it has no villain in it. We measured accuracy because accuracy is easy to score — a claim is true or it is not — and we never built a score for whether an answer connects a citizen to the institution actually accountable for their vote. So that half of the job quietly stopped being done, and in Google's case it stopped mid-study.
Brazil moved faster and harder than anyone and still wrote its rule for the failure everyone could picture: the machine that endorses, the machine that lies. That is not an argument against regulating. It is an argument that a rule aimed at the wrong failure buys very little — and that the omission failure has not been aimed at anywhere.
My vote? Judge these systems on handoffs, not only on facts. An assistant that gets your polling place right and never mentions your clerk has answered your question and skipped your democracy — and the fact that it did so politely, fluently, and without a single false statement is precisely why nobody has written the law against it yet.
Watching where accountability quietly goes missing — even when nothing false was said — is the whole reason the HAIA Foundation exists. If that is your kind of thing, subscribe — and then go find out who runs your election.