News Clips

Jonathan Mehta Stein is a co-founder of The California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, a project of good government group California Common Cause, which has been advising legislators on the threats emerging technologies pose to democracy. He points to the growing use of AI in elections across the world as evidence it's no longer a theoretical, but an active practice. In the first month of 2024, deepfakes promulgating misinformation in Bangladeshi and Slovakian elections proved to be significant election disruptions. Here in the United States, AI-generated content is met with considerable concern on the heels of rising political violence and distrust in election processes. "All of these new technologies that can deceive voters and undermine elections are coming on the heels of other depressing trends," Stein said. "In our democracy, trust in institutions and in the media are all-time lows. Beliefs that our elections are being run securely and votes are counted accurately are in doubt among huge percentages of the American population."

The recent Indiana Civic Health Index should be a wakeup call for Indiana elected officials, like the alarm of medical devices alerting doctors and nurses to a patient in need of urgent care.   If you haven’t read the report, let me call out the alarms clearly. Indiana:   * ranked 50th in voting in the 2022 elections   * has consistently ranked in the bottom 10 in voting for the last 13 years  * moved backward in the rankings for both voting participation and voter registration in the last 11 plus years.   

Such training sessions and the election day actions for which they prepare attendees are less about ensuring integrity in Texas elections than they are about voter intimidation, according to Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nongovernmental organization that works to expand voting rights. While he was unaware of what Pressley’s session was to cover, he said in a phone interview that such groups “seem to be going out of their way to use poll watchers to intimidate or at least harass voters of color in different parts of the states.” Gutierrez pointed to a 2021 video of a Harris County Republican Party presentation in which a man identifying with the county’s Republican Party said that they were trying to recruit an “army” of 10,000 poll workers to fight voter fraud. In the video, the presenter can be seen using a cursor to point to a predominantly white part of Houston. He says that they were looking to recruit people with “the confidence and courage to come down in here” — moving the cursor to predominantly Black and Brown communities — to fight voter fraud. Gutierrez expressed concern over the lack of transparency of Tuesday’s training session in Arlington. “If groups are kicking people out of their training, you have to wonder what they’re training people on,” he said.

Julia Vaughn, who leads government watchdog Common Cause Indiana, similarly asked the committee to instead turn its attention to the BMV. “It seems backwards to attack this by examining the voter’s status. Why not get the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to quit illegally registering people?” she asked.

Ishan Mehta, media and democracy program director for Common Cause, said the calls in New Hampshire last month represented "only the tip of the iceberg" and warned that "it is critically important that the FCC now use this authority to fine violators and block the telephone companies that carry the calls." Mehta called on Congress to pass the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, which would prohibit the distribution ofdeceptive AI-generated audio, images, or video relating to federal candidates in political ads. "We hope that both the House and the Senate will follow the example of the FCC," said Mehta, "whose Democratic and Republican commissioners recognized the threat posed by AI and came together in a unanimous vote to outlaw robocalls utilizing AI voice-cloning tools."

It’s easy to discount such "conspiracy theory nonsense" from random trolls on X, but it’s powerful when it comes from Musk, who owns the platform, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a group that advocates for voting rights. Democracies require participation, and falsehoods "only increase the likelihood that people will lose faith in our elections and simply opt out," Gutierrez said.