People are peppering artificial intelligence chatbots everyday 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 re-examine 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 impacting 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 to merely understand how AI systems spread information, but also 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 impact the midterms, and what voters should keep in mind when they interact with chatbots.
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