- The postman, who knows you well, smiles as he walks to your door and hands you a bunch of letters.
- It has a deadline, and you may be purged from the voter list if you don’t respond to it.
- You had read about the government using AI to detect and eliminate electoral fraud through selective querying.
- In 2017 and 2018, more than 340,000 Wisconsin residents received a letter asking them to confirm if they needed to remain on the voter list.
- Eric used data on voting history to identify movers – but also administrative data such as driving licence and post office records.
The approach seemed highly effective. Only 2% of people responded, suggesting the vast majority of the people contacted were indeed movers. But research later showed systematic demographic patterns among Eric errors. The people erroneously identified as movers (and ended up showing up to vote) were far more likely to be from ethnic minorities.
AI and ‘majoritarian gerrymandering’
- AI algorithms are used in a variety of real-world settings to make judgments on human users.
- Every online payment transaction is being assessed by an AI in real-time to decide whether it could be fraudulent.
- Our research shows that abundant AI capacity is available to make judgments on whether people’s behaviour is deviant or abnormal.
Who gets a vote?
- Having ineligible voters lurking on lists opens the possibility for spurious voting, skewing the result and damaging electoral integrity.
- On the other hand, leaving eligible voters off a list disenfranchises them and could result in election results that don’t reflect the true will of the people.
- To do a good job, efforts towards clean voter lists need to spread their focus reasonably between integrity and access.
- It could lead voters to feel electoral offices are obsessively oriented towards fault-finding and much less interested in democratic inclusion.
Stanley Simoes receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945231; and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland. Deepak Padmanabhan and Muiris MacCarthaigh do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
