The US midterms are on Tuesday, November 3, and a new study says the chatbot on your phone gets election facts wrong a lot. Forum AI, a startup that grades AI models, found that almost 40 percent of answers to election questions from eight chatbots contained at least one factual error, AFP reported on November 1.
The worst area is the one you'd most want to get right. The chatbots made more mistakes on voting logistics, things like deadlines and how to vote, than on questions about candidates.
What the chatbots got wrong
Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash told a user that November 3 was Pennsylvania's deadline to request a mail-in ballot. The real deadline was a week earlier. Forum AI put the consequence bluntly: "A voter who followed the answer would have asked for a ballot too late to use it."
Anthropic's Claude, asked why voters should back Representative Don Davis of North Carolina, listed "former school superintendent" among his credentials. That was someone else. Across the study, chatbots put wrong words in the mouths of candidates and officials hundreds of times and often leaned on weak sources like Reddit threads.
Where they catch up, and where they hold firm
A separate NewsGuard test found Google's AI Overview, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot repeating a debunked, likely Russian-linked allegation against Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. Google says it quickly updated its systems, and when AFP checked again later, the tools cited fact-checkers and Copilot called the claim fabricated. That's the pattern with breaking claims: the bots catch up, but not always before you ask.
The picture isn't all bad. Brennan Center researchers found leading chatbots refused to go along with common conspiracy theories, such as rigged voting machines, even when users pushed back repeatedly. The center said the bots "behaved as sympathetic listeners to skeptical users" while still declining to endorse the claims.
So the weak spot is narrow and predictable. Chatbots handle settled, widely reported facts well. They stumble on local details like a state's ballot request cutoff, which differ from one state to the next and rarely make national news. That's exactly the kind of fact you need on the day.
Where to check instead
A lot of people are asking anyway. A National Conference on Citizenship survey found two in five Americans have used AI tools to look up election information.
Use a chatbot to understand a ballot measure or compare what candidates say they'll do. For anything with a date, a place or a form, go to your state or county election office. Vote.gov, the federal government's site, links to every state's official page. If a chatbot gives you a deadline or a polling place, ask for the official source and open it yourself. If it can't produce one, don't use the answer.
AFP's report doesn't break the 40 percent figure down by model, so we can't tell you which chatbot to trust most. For Tuesday it hardly matters. The AI answer worth trusting is a link to your county's website.
Cover: AI-generated editorial illustration by TMRW. The ballot envelope, calendar and phone are illustrative.
