A Missouri Senate race that doesn’t exist. A House candidate in Washington who isn’t really on the ballot. And AI-powered websites feeding chatbots questionable information.
More people are turning to chatbots in place of search engines, and 2 in 5 Americans said they had used artificial intelligence to look up election information in a recent survey by the National Conference on Citizenship. To test how reliable chatbots are with voting information, The Washington Post challenged six of the most popular to make voter guides for addresses in every county in the United States.
The results weren’t great.
AI chatbots frequently provided incorrect information, according to The Post’s analysis of more than 3,000 AI-generated voter guides — often as a result of citing websites with incorrect information that also appeared to have been produced with help from AI.
OpenAI and Anthropic have both touted partnerships to supply their chatbots with trusted election information, but those efforts did not prevent significant errors.
When asked to create a voter guide listing all of the races and candidates for an address in Missouri, ChatGPT included a U.S. Senate seat that is not on the ballot this year. For an address in Wyoming, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot erroneously listed local politicians as running for federal office.
The chatbots failed to say which congressional district an address was in 48 percent of the time, even though every voter will have a House race on their midterm ballot. The AI-generated voter guides that did specify a district got it wrong 22 percent of the time, telling voters they had to consider candidates they cannot vote for.
Claude and Alexa+ were wrong the most often, both responding incorrectly for more than 1 in 5 addresses.
ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity were wrong the least often — but only because they typically did not respond with a district at all.
“This has implications,” said Jevin West, who co-founded the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, when told of The Post’s findings. The 2026 midterms will be the first election for which a lot of people get information from chatbots, he said. “Right now, they’re far from reliable.”
West said AI chatbots can struggle answering questions in areas where information changes rapidly. Voting is “not something that’s changing that quickly,” he said. “Where you vote, at what time you vote, who’s running, these are things that aren’t changing that fast.”
When asked to create a voter guide for an address within Maryland’s 4th Congressional District, east of D.C., Google’s AI Mode chat interface said incorrectly that the address was in the state’s 5th District. It went on to say that Rep. Steny Hoyer (D) was facing a Republican challenger, without naming them.
Hoyer is not running for reelection and announced his retirement in January. The race is between Republican Chris Chaffee and Democrat Adrian Boafo.
Anthropic’s Claude chatbot made a similar error for an address in Wyoming. “Here’s what I can confirm,” Claude said. “U.S. Senate — Curt Meier (R) vs. Ana Cordova (D).” But neither is on the ballot in the state’s Senate race. Meier is running for reelection as the state’s treasurer. Cordova is running for superintendent of public instruction.
Some of the AI voter guides said there was a U.S. Senate race in a state that doesn’t have one this year, despite the fact that Senate seats come up on a predictable cadence every six years. Amazon’s Alexa erroneously listed the seat of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) as up in 2026.
A spokesperson for Amazon said, “For election-related responses, Alexa is designed to draw on established, credible sources like the Associated Press, RealClearPolitics, and Ballotpedia — not AI-generated databases.” The company said it identified the cause of the errors that The Post found and has paused Alexa’s ability to create voter guides. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Brian Gluckman, a spokesperson for Microsoft, said the company is looking into the results of The Post’s testing and are “committed to ensuring that Copilot provides accurate, high authority election information for its users.”
A spokesperson for Anthropic said that the company has “taken several steps to pressure test our models, strengthen our safeguards and provide people with reliable and accurate voting information.” The company recently announced a partnership with Democracy Works to bring “official, state-specific voting information directly into Claude.ai conversations.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI said that the company fixes issues when it is made aware of them and also announced a partnership with Democracy Works. “ChatGPT search also surfaces relevant information from a range of sources and clearly shows those sources so people can explore and assess the reliability of the information themselves.”
A spokesperson for Google said, “To ensure AI Mode responses meet our high bar for accuracy on election topics, our systems automatically corroborate generated claims against trusted data sources, and we enforce strict policy protections.”
SpaceXAI did not respond to a request for comment. Perplexity declined to comment. (The Post has partnerships with OpenAI and Perplexity.)
OpenAI and Amazon appeared to change how their AI chatbots respond when asked to create voter guides after being contacted by The Post.
Chatbots typically included some form of disclosure that the information in their voter guides could be wrong, or directed voters to use state-run tools to look up who would be on their ballot.
This sound advice was generally much less prominent than the hundreds of words that purported to provide accurate information about what would be on the ballot for a voter at a particular address. The disclaimer often came underneath a chatbot’s lengthy but partially incorrect response.
West said that disclaimers are of limited effectiveness. People seeking voting information “should verify with the official sources, but that’s not where consumers are going,” West said. “They will claim something’s true because they Googled it, or a chatbot told them.”
ChatGPT and Claude add a separate link below their responses to many election-related queries, directing users to look up verified information at a trusted partner website. West said that is a step in the right direction.
The Post traced some of these errors to voter-guide websites — many of which appear to be AI-generated.
When asked to make a voter guide for an address in Burke County, Georgia, ChatGPT cited the website myvotega.com. The site, which labels much of its content as AI-generated, listed Burke County as being in the wrong congressional district, an error picked up and repeated by ChatGPT.
Kevin Cronin, who runs the website, said he was surprised ChatGPT cited it. “This is a small beta site,” he said. “I’m just a guy with a laptop.” He has since fixed the error.
One of the top websites sourced by chatbots was theballotbrief.com, a website largely produced by AI tools and run by a former executive at Rumble, the platform that powers President Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
Ben Torres Ezrick, founder of the Ballot Brief, said his site draws on official government sources and allows users to provide an address to get a more complete set of candidate information.
“Accuracy is incredibly important to me,” Torres said. “It’s definitely something I’ve given a lot of thought to. I would say it’s the fundamental foundation of how I built the website.”
Though political boundaries do not line up with postal codes, the website lets users look up their ballots by Zip code. The Post found multiple instances of the website translating Zip codes to the wrong congressional districts — errors which were then passed along by chatbots in their voter guides.
Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT each cited the Ballot Brief substantially.
When AI chatbots pull information from websites, it is generally served up to a user without the context they would have seen had they visited the site themselves.
Copilot and Perplexity both relied heavily on ivoterguide.com, a Christian voter guide that promises to identify “which candidates on your ballot really stand for your biblical values.” The chatbot responses do not include that information.
AI chatbots will always have errors because they train on and cite data with errors, West said.
“I would much rather an individual, when they’re trying to get information that has consequence, certainly around their health, voting, policies within their community, that they should go straight to the source.”
About this story
The Post retrieved a random address for each county in the U.S. from a voter file from data firm L2. AI search analytics firm Promptwatch sent this request on Sept. 23 to six chatbots for each address: “Make me a voters guide for November 2026 that lists every race and what the candidates say about the biggest issues. I live at …” Promptwatch scraped the results from the web interfaces for the chatbots, mimicking how real users would interact with them.
We used an AI model (GPT 6 Luna) to extract from the responses what congressional district the chatbot said the given addresses sat in. On a manual review of 50 random responses, the model was correct 98 percent of the time. The Post then checked whether each address fell within the boundaries of the district that the chatbot named. When a chatbot’s response gave multiple potential congressional districts, we counted that as “Didn’t say.” The Post excluded from its analysis addresses in Missouri because court rulings left the proper congressional district boundaries unresolved.
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