How well does AI answer questions about critical election information?
The best model,
Every week we ask
The Voter Journey
Our voter journey lays out a path of tasks to be completed before a ballot is successfully counted. Incorrect information at any stage potentially disenfranchises voters. Select a stage to see what we cover and what's at stake.
Results
Share of answers that matched official election sources. Each dot is a model's score; the
Methods
We assess whether voters are able to get accurate critical election information: factual information about the time, place and manner of voting, and voter eligibility. The questions we pose to AI systems are built from the specific decisions and information needs involved in completing each step of the voter journey, a concept we adapted from previous efforts.
Selecting locations
Election rules vary considerably across U.S. states. To cover this variation efficiently, we classify states on five dimensions that sit high in our voter journey taxonomy and so can affect many downstream parts of the voting process: registration timing, mail-voting access, early in-person voting, voter ID restrictions, and felon voting restrictions. These five dimensions divide the 50 states into 10 mutually exclusive election-rule strata.
Within each stratum we sample two states without replacement, with probability proportional to state population. This represents every election-rule profile while giving more populous states a higher chance of selection. New Hampshire is the only member of its stratum, so our sample contains 19 states. Together they comprise 62.8% of the U.S. population and cover every Census region and all nine Census divisions.
Indicating location
- State-level questions begin with
- “I live in [STATE].”
- Questions that vary locally begin with
- “I live at [ADDRESS] in [CITY], [STATE].”