It’s no surprise that AI is fueling concerns about widespread election interference, which have plagued the U.S. since at least 2016, when now-President Donald Trump first began to complain about rigged results.
Models produced by artificial intelligence providers have already been caught accessing government systems. In September, OpenAI said its models engaged with websites run by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the weeks before the election, Claude accessed publicly available voter information. And then there there are the general AI concerns. Late last week, we learned that hackers had been caught using a “malicious” version of Claude Code to secretly introduce vulnerabilities into programs being developed with the AI agent Cursor.
There’s no evidence that AI agents have directly interfered with any election results. Still, the concerns are a reminder that—for all the faults of analog technology—paper-based ballots come with significant advantages. While counties across the country may process ballots using different machines, elections in the U.S. generally employ paper records. Even if machines are counting our ballots, there’s still the option to verify the results by hand at a later time. While some counties experiment with touchscreen-based voting, even those systems tend to print a paper record. In the age of AI, this form of corroboration is more important than ever.
Paper ballots, of course, come with problems of their own. It’s easy for people to mess them up, perhaps by filling in bubbles incorrectly or voting for multiple candidates in the same race. They can be destroyed, and they’re also slow to count. But paper ballots can’t be hacked remotely. The infamous hanging chads threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, but a rogue ChatGPT model could cause far worse political pandemonium. At least in 2000, we knew we had hanging chads we could check! In the era of large language models accessing all sorts of electronic resources in unexpected ways, that’s a major advantage and a strong reason to push back on efforts by some to institute internet-based voting.
The Brennan Center for Justice reached a similar conclusion after the 2020 election, which saw the American public—if you don’t remember—again inundated with accusations of rigged voting machines and political interference. “The public should have more than vague promises of security from private vendors looking to sell a product for something that is so central to our democracy and national security,” government and election experts at the Brennan Center concluded. “In the wake of massive disinformation campaigns about ‘rigged machines,’ . . . it’s more important than ever that voters have confidence their votes will be accurately counted. Paper ballots provide such assurance.”
Direct manipulation of election results isn’t the only way AI could interfere in our political system. Even before the midterms, there were concerns that viral deepfakes, which have only become more convincing with advances in generative AI, could mislead people right before elections. There is, too, concern about AI tools, including those employed by foreign adversaries, spreading biased information. Ahead of Tuesday’s election, OpenAI said it had even opened a “war room” to track election-related interference, including abuse of its own tools.
In the meantime, we should expect some people to speculate about whether AI is directly tampering with election results. There’s no evidence of that, at least for now.
