While there is potential for this to be a bad thing, I think on the whole it's positive. Most/many people don't interact with democracy at all or only "red vs blue" which means increasingly less the more local you get (IMHO). Instead, focusing on what they candidates say/have done and how that aligns with your own views is a far better system.

And maybe, just maybe, it will pull some of these dinosaurs out of the stone age and force them to put up a website with their views (crazy I'm saying this in 2026, it should have been table stakes decades ago). Local races are incredibly difficult to find information on. Your best bet is one of those "voter guides" that a local newspaper might put out and even those aren't great. Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

> Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values.

This sounds like it can be a really good thing. In an ideal world it’s a perfect use of LLMs. It helps make the ballot more approachable to people, and it can encourage more people to vote or help people vote less blindly.

At the same time, it also relies on these tools being unbiased adjudicators. And over time I think there’s a greater risk of this straying from the truth.

Any guesses what Grok will be pushing people towards?

And so it begins: the outsourcing of research, thinking, and reasoning to AI in lieu of using their own brains, an opaque AI in the hands of trillion dollar corporations with their own agendas and shareholders to please.

In the future, maybe we won't need election analyses to predict political victories, we can just ask all of the major brand of AIs who a voter should choose and then multiply by the market share of each AI, dohohoho.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) So it begins...

IMO for an involved voter, this is actually a good thing. AI can both help you clearly define your priorities and policy preferences via an "interview", and can subsequently find candidates who's publicly stated positions, and past record, align most closely with your priorities.

As always, AI can be used to completely outsource critical thinking, and doing so for elections is extremely concerning. However I would hope that more people use it to make better, more informed decisions, than to blindly choose candidates

What's worse, a populatiom being uninformed, or homogeneously informed?

This can only be illegal. Law, and all human rights and responsibilitys are built on the idea of humans making indipendent Judgments, free from any coersion or missleading information,, and so to allow giving voting advice from a machine with known, programed in, biases and inhibitory blocks is impossible, and could very quickly lead to total AI bans in many juristictions as there may be no reasonable way to monitor and certify such devices.

To be fair, Americans have previously asked ouija boards, psychics, and the Magic 8-Ball the same question in the past… at least they’re not asking Grok.

Yet.

Hopefully as a lark...

Just vote for your party. cough Republican cough