Protecting Voters in the Era of Generative AI
Democracy Works is helping voters navigate the first elections that will be significantly impacted by artificial intelligence
Our Work
Since 2010, Democracy Works has provided Americans with reliable, useful voting guidance. We reach users through the sites, apps, and organizations they trust most by leveraging our data and no/low code solutions.
We send election reminders through TurboVote, our platform that equips groups dedicated to reaching voters online with easily customizable voting guides, reminders, and tools to convince their audiences to vote in every election.
Our election data platform supports government and tech partners at scale. Millions of search queries are powered by our schema-compliant web syndication, while our API powers text, app, and email reminders for thousands of elections every year. Our users have also built apps relying on our API’s dates, deadlines, and instructions.
Evolving Opportunities and Risks
When OpenAI released ChatGPT just after the 2022 midterm elections, it became clear that U.S. democracy had entered a new phase — one where generative artificial intelligence could impact people’s access to voting information. 2024 will be the first federal general election cycle of this generative AI era, with large language models (LLMs) making it possible for voting information to reach audiences in new ways.
However, providing reliable voting guidance through this new technology will be a complicated process. Elections in the US are managed by state and local election officials, which means voting guidance varies substantially from state to state, county to county, and even election to election. Since registering to vote and casting a ballot often require following complex instructions, inaccurate voting guidance can become misinformation that disenfranchises voters.
There is also a significant threat that bad actors will attempt to mislead and manipulate voters on a massive scale using these powerful new technologies. Disinformation campaigns have already been successfully deployed in recent elections with tools that are far less sophisticated than generative AI.
To mitigate these risks, new LLMs must use additional integrations to ensure the content they generate is accurate and voter engagement organizations must provide their audiences with reliable election information. Democracy Works data can play a critical role in these initiatives.
Innovation and Safety
To safeguard voters in the first elections of the generative AI era, Democracy Works is pursuing partnerships with generative AI platforms to direct users to authoritative sources of election information. We have also created detailed guidance for AI developers seeking to incorporate our accurate, comprehensive elections data into their tools.
Our aim is to ensure that all sites and apps powered by our data – including TurboVote and third-party experiences – are reliable and trustworthy. Whether you are a media outlet, an advocacy group, or a developer building generative AI products, our solutions allow your voter outreach projects to provide accurate election information.
Our data is sourced from authoritative government sources and can provide a canonical source of truth for partners seeking to distribute voting guidance in innovative ways. Visitors to our website can learn about the robust research and quality assurance processes we have developed in order to ensure our data is comprehensive, accurate, and timely.
We recently released our new Elections API and syndication-ready schema-compliant web pages, our latest advancements in powering reliable voter engagement experiences like election and registration reminders. In addition to providing transparent, accurate election information to voter outreach partners, TurboVote now serves as the reference app for everything we offer programmatically. This platform shows developers smart ways to use our data to help voters and proves we can operate at the scale these projects require.
Building Trust
Given rising awareness of misinformation and disinformation, we believe people will become increasingly skeptical of the reliability of online sources and products that leverage generative AI. To strengthen our partners’ credibility in a volatile information landscape, we are working hard to optimize the transparency of our products.
We recently created a new “About this guide” section on all state and local election guides in TurboVote to clearly communicate the source of the data on the page. This feature also explains how audiences can report an issue.
The Democracy Works Elections API always returns a canonical link to a secure web page where voters can review the data source, report issues, and view details about our research practices.
Join Us
Democracy Works is committed to providing our partners with a reliable, comprehensive, and transparent data source as advances in generative AI change the ways people seek and distribute information. Learn more about how we can assist with your projects and help you safeguard voters in this new era.