This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: People are peppering artificial intelligence chatbots every day with questions, but when it comes to politics and the looming 2026 U.S. midterm elections, what role are AI platforms playing? Could an AI chatbot sway a voter to switch parties or reexamine their political beliefs?
MIT researchers have built a new dashboard, called the LLM Election Observatory, to examine, in real time, how popular AI chatbots are responding to questions about the 2026 midterm elections. The team behind the dashboard—led by professor Adam Berinsky, assistant professor Chara Podimata and professor Charles Stewart III—has extensive experience studying voting and election administration, AI and misinformation, and how AI systems are affecting human decision-making. In an effort to better understand how AI is shaping the election, they designed the dashboard to simulate how individuals across the country communicate with chatbots.
The team tracks how different AI systems respond to the same fixed set of questions on a range of topics, including election certification, hot-button issues, result predictions, news coverage and more. Every few days, the LLM Election Observatory team runs the questions through the chatbots again, monitoring how their responses vary as the election gets closer depending on user location, political party affiliation, identity and other factors. The goal of this work is not merely to understand how AI systems spread information, but also to better comprehend how they are shaping political discourse and voter understanding of political issues across the country.
MIT News chatted with Podimata, the Class of 1942 Career Development Professor, an assistant professor of operations research and statistics in the MIT Sloan School of Management and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; and Berinsky, the Mitsui Professor and a professor in the Department of Political Science, about their work with the LLM Election Observatory, how AI could affect the midterms and what voters should keep in mind when they interact with chatbots. Podimata: People are increasingly using AI chatbots to find and make sense of political and election-related information. That makes it important to understand what information these systems actually provide, not just at one moment in time but throughout an election cycle.
This is particularly challenging because the models themselves are continually getting updates, the political information inputs available to them are themselves changing, and their answers can depend on how a user asks a question or what information the user provides about themselves. One basic problem is that we currently do not have a good historical record of this information environment. If an AI system gives a particular answer about an election today and gives a different answer several weeks later, it can be very difficult to reconstruct after the fact what voters would have seen at each point in time.
One important goal of our project is simply to systematically document that environment as it develops and make the resulting data available to other researchers and to the public. Ultimately, factual accuracy is only the first frontier. We absolutely need to understand whether chatbots provide accurate political information, but we also need to pay just as much attention to the subtler ways in which they may shape people's understanding of political issues.
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