Perplexity, a company specializing in AI search technology, announced its new Election Information Hub on Friday to address the use of AI in providing crucial voting information. This hub is designed to offer AI-generated answers to voting queries, summaries of candidates, and will also track live vote counts on Election Day, November 5th, utilizing data from The Associated Press. The voter information, including polling requirements, locations, and times, is sourced from Democracy Works, a group that also powers similar features for Google. According to Perplexity, the election-related responses are derived from “a curated set of the most trustworthy and informative sources.”
Sara Plotnick, a spokesperson for Perplexity, confirmed via email to The Verge that the company has official partnerships with both The Associated Press and Democracy Works for this hub. Plotnick further explained that Perplexity has chosen domains known for being non-partisan and fact-checked, such as Ballotpedia and various news organizations, ensuring that these sources are prioritized in election-related queries. The hub provides detailed information about the ballot specific to a user’s location and includes tabs for tracking elections for the President, US Senate, and US House, offering per-state breakdowns with the percentage of votes counted and leading candidates.
The system, however, has encountered some errors, including an incorrect AI summary that omitted the fact that Robert F. Kennedy had dropped out of the race and incorrectly listed a “Future Madam Potus” candidate. This led to a summary of Vice President Kamala Harris, albeit with meme images not typical to her normal summary. Plotnick mentioned that the company is investigating the omission regarding Kennedy’s candidacy status. She also noted that depending on the location, write-in candidates might appear, which could explain the listing of Future Madam Potus. According to Ballotpedia, Future Madam Potus is indeed running as a write-in candidate, but this does not explain the summary of Harris.
These inaccuracies highlight the challenges of using generative AI, which can struggle with accuracy, especially for critical applications like voting information. Other AI companies such as ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google Gemini have opted to refer voter inquiries to established resources such as canivote.org or Google Search. Microsoft’s Copilot, for instance, refrained from providing answers regarding voter information.
