Washington Post finds chatbots leaning on AI-built voter guide sites ahead of US midterms

Days before the US midterm elections, reporting by The Washington Post suggests that popular AI chatbots draw much of their ballot information from little-known voter guide websites, some of them largely produced with AI. A follow-up published on October 30, 2026 focused on one of them, theballotbrief.com. According to AI Weekly's account of that piece, Microsoft Copilot cited the site in about 75% of the Post's voter-guide tests and ChatGPT in about 22%. The Post's original article could not be accessed for this report.

What the tests showed

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 responses, according to its October 28 article. The chatbots did not name a congressional district 48% of the time, and when they did, they were wrong in 22% of cases. Some errors, such as a nonexistent Missouri Senate race, came from the models themselves. Others were traced to third-party voter guide sites, many of which appeared to be AI-generated. FourWeekMBA's summary notes that Copilot and Perplexity also relied heavily on ivoterguide.com, and that ChatGPT cited myvotega.com for a Georgia county.

The Ballot Brief case

The Post describes Ballot Brief as largely built with AI tools and run by a former executive of the video platform Rumble. Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT each cited it substantially. Reporters found several instances in which the site matched ZIP codes to the wrong congressional districts, and chatbots passed those mistakes on to users. The site's founder, Ben Torres Ezrick, told the Post that it draws on official government sources and that users can enter a full address for more complete information. In a July press release, the site said it launched in June 2026 and builds candidate lists from certified rosters published by election offices.

How companies responded

OpenAI's Nate Evans said ChatGPT's search tools cite a range of sources and that the company acts when problems are flagged; OpenAI also pointed to its partnership with Democracy Works. Microsoft told the Post it was looking into the results. Amazon said it had paused Alexa's ability to create voter guides, and Perplexity declined to comment. The findings highlight a weak point in AI search: answers are only as reliable as the pages a model retrieves, and automatically generated sites can rank as sources without obvious signals of their quality. Election officials' own websites remain the authoritative reference for voters.