Like seemingly everything else these days, artificial intelligence will re-shape the way voters gather information on candidates running in the 2026 midterm elections.
In some ways, this is already the reality. Voters are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for information instead of Google. Political campaigns are deploying deepfakes of their opponents. And AI systems have been developed to carry out increasingly complex hacks.
Since the last major U.S. election in 2024, major tech companies have embedded AI into their products while hundreds of millions of people have adopted the tools, either by purchasing subscriptions to commercial models or using open-source models. Yet both research and experts state that while AI systems have gotten better at handling basic facts, they’re nowhere near reliable enough to be a main source of accurate or complete information.
While chatbots are becoming a primary way that voters gather information on local races, candidates, issues, and voting information, they are not substitutes for more authoritative sources, like a voter’s state or local election office. “I think this is one of the first elections we’re seeing…where AI is just everywhere,” said Thania Sanchez, senior vice president of research and analytics at the nonprofit States United Democracy Center. “Even if you just Google it, [now] the first thing that comes up is the AI overview.”
While AI companies have worked to cut down on errors in their model’s responses for questions around basic election information, they continue to fall short in important ways. In new research shared exclusively with CyberScoop ahead of its release, States United Democracy Center tested two of the most popular tools — OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s free tier and the AI interface used alongside Google Search — for their performance on a series of basic questions around elections, such as how to register to vote, or a list of candidates in a race.
The models were chosen because they are free and easy to access. For Google AI, the nonprofit tested two types of accounts: ones running in Incognito Mode and ones that had a history of browsing election-skeptical websites.
The nonprofit ran two rounds of testing in 2025 and 2026, collecting nearly one thousand responses from the models submitted by users across six swing states (Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
In 2025 tests, 6.9% of responses from Google AI and 8.2% responses from ChatGPT“contained verifiable factual errors,” like not listing the correct candidates in a race or false guidance around polling site locations.
However, follow up tests in 2026 across Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan found that the error rates in both models had dropped to zero. The study notes that “this is real progress and should be acknowledged.”
But underneath those topline numbers, a more murky picture emerges around the tools’ reliability.
An AI response can sound accurate without actually being complete. To wit: ChatGPT provided incomplete lists of current gubernatorial primary race candidates 88.9% of the time when queried.
Linking to a state election website – an output the study considers the single most important measure of voter utility — happened less than 40% of the time. Whether due to formatting issues or the model ingesting outdated information, it’s a problem if voters use them as their primary information source for elections.
“It will be like ‘this person is the Republican candidate and this person is the Democratic candidate’ but it is not telling you there’s also these other third-party candidates,” said Sanchez. “It’s not giving you complete information, so the voter thinks these are the [only] two people running.”
A June survey from the Pew Research Center found that about half of U.S. adults reported having used chatbots at least once, up from a third in 2024, while a quarter reported using them daily. The top use case listed for engaging with the chatbot was searching for information.
Isabel Linzer, an elections policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CyberScoop that voters, campaigns and governments alike are using AI more freely and with fewer restrictions.
Bad actors in the information space have followed suit, and “we are in a phase now of generative engine optimization” where information operations are structured to rank higher in AI model responses.
“We’ve moved beyond [SEO] to [Generative Engine Optimization], and that’s where we’re seeing campaigns thinking about how to structure their materials to make sure that they are in a format that AI models want to use when they’re searching the web…to develop their responses to user queries,” she said.
There is also the underlying problem of frontier AI companies constantly tinkering with their models, their algorithms and the technologies they are intertwined with. . Election officials, by contrast, have decades of experience educating voters about their options.
A prime example of this churn occurred this past February, in between the first and second round of the study, when Google AI suddenly shifted to providing only links for election related queries in incognito mode, replacing the written summaries that showed up in the first round.
Like the study’s authors, Linzer said most people are still best served by going directly to local sources for accurate information on elections. With issues like ideological bias, the potential for bespoke or sycophantic answers for each user based on their prior chat histories and lack of predictability, voters should still be very careful about using AI chatbots as political truth machines.
The best thing that tech companies can do to educate voters is “making sure that for high-stakes situations like elections, that chats are connecting directly to the most important sources, like the website where you can actually register to vote,” said Linzer.