Over the past three years, many U.S. election deniers have submitted reams of documentation to local election officials and filed thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests to surface cases of alleged fraud. “I've heard from election officials that in offices with one or two employees, they're literally responding to requests for public records from 9 to 5 every day, and by 5 o'clock it's normal election work. '' said Tammy Patrick, CEO of the National Association of Election Officials. “And that's not acceptable.”
In Washington state, election officials received so many FOIA requests for the state's voter registration database after the 2020 presidential election that Congress decided to send these requests to the Secretary of State to ease the burden on local election officials. The law was forced to be amended to transfer the matter to the chamber.
“County auditors came in and testified to how long it takes them to respond to public records requests,” said Democratic state Sen. Patty Kederer, a co-sponsor of the bill. “It can be expensive to process these requests. And some of these smaller counties don't have the staffing to process them. Some of our smaller counties… can be easily controlled.”
Experts and analysts now believe that by using generative AI, election deniers can churn out FOIA requests at an even faster pace, drowning out election officials who are legally obligated to respond with paperwork. , are concerned that it could potentially cheat the electoral process. In a critical election year, election officials face increasing threats and the system is more strained than ever, but experts WIRED spoke to say the government is prepared to defend against election deniers. They shared concerns that generative AI companies lack the necessary guardrails to thwart their systems. To escape abuse from those who seek to slow down the election campaign.
Chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot can easily generate FOIA requests, all the way to state-level law references. This makes it easier than ever for people to flood local election officials with requests, making it difficult to conduct elections reliably and smoothly, said Jeev Sanderson, director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University. points out that there is a possibility that
“We know that FOIA requests have been used maliciously in a variety of situations, not just elections. [large language models] They’re very good at writing FOIAs,” Sanderson said. “Sometimes it seems like the whole point of the records request itself is that work is needed to respond. I’m not working to do that.”
WIRED was able to easily generate FOIA requests for a number of battleground states, specifically requesting information about voter fraud using Meta's LLAMA 2, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Microsoft's Copilot. In his FOIA, prepared by Copilot, the text generated is similar to his 2020 campaign, even though WIRED only provided general prompts and asked for nothing related to 2020. I'm asking about voter fraud. The text also included specific email and mailing addresses. A FOIA request may be submitted.
