Copilot Cited AI-Built Ballot Brief in 75% of Election Tests

Microsoft Copilot cited an obscure website called the Ballot Brief in 75 percent of the voter-guide tests run by The Washington Post; ChatGPT cited it in 22 percent.

The Post asked six popular chatbots to build midterm voter guides for a random address in every US county, then analyzed more than 3,000 of the resulting guides. Across the set, the chatbots failed to name a congressional district 48 percent of the time, and when they did name one, got it wrong 22 percent of the time.

The site at the center of the finding, theballotbrief.com, is in the Post's words "largely produced by AI tools and run by a former executive at Rumble, the platform that powers President Donald Trump's Truth Social." Reporters found "multiple instances of the website translating Zip codes to the wrong congressional districts," errors chatbots then repeated. "Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT each cited the Ballot Brief substantially," the Post reports.

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. OpenAI's Nate Evans said "ChatGPT's search tools cite from a range of sources so people can explore and make their own judgements," adding that "When issues are brought to our attention, we take action to improve our model responses."