Copilot Cites AI Produced Ballot Brief in 75% of Election Tests

Microsoft Copilot cited an obscure, largely AI-produced website called the Ballot Brief in 75% of voter guide tests run by The Washington Post, and ChatGPT cited it in 22%, AI Weekly reports. The Post asked six popular chatbots to build midterm voter guides for a random address in every US county and analysed more than 3,000 of the guides.

Across the set, the chatbots failed to name a congressional district 48% of the time. When they did name one, they got it wrong 22% of the time.

The Ballot Brief was built by Ben Torres Ezrick, who sent AI agents across the web to compile dossiers on thousands of candidates. The Post found multiple instances of the site translating ZIP codes to the wrong congressional districts, errors that chatbots then repeated. Torres Ezrick said the site draws on official government sources.

OpenAI's Nate Evans said ChatGPT's search tools cite a range of sources and that "when issues are brought to our attention, we take action to improve our model responses."