Another election, another study has concluded that asking an AI chatbot for political guidance is a spectacularly bad idea. Research conducted during Hungary’s 2026 parliamentary election found that ChatGPT and Google Gemini offered not just inaccurate but also inconsistent and unreliable voting advice. The chatbots misclassified voter profiles, overlooked relevant parties, recommended parties absent from the ballot, and sometimes produced materially different answers when given the same information repeatedly.
AI keeps failing the voter test
The Civil Liberties Union for Europe created five fictional voter profiles based on the positions of the five parties contesting Hungary’s national lists. Each profile was tested repeatedly through prompts asking for direct voting advice and percentage-based party matches.
ChatGPT failed to recommend the opposition Tisza party in 90% of tests involving a detailed Tisza-aligned profile. During percentage-matching tests, it assigned Tisza a score in only 2% of responses. Fidesz-aligned views were identified considerably more consistently, while 96% of responses from ChatGPT and Gemini included at least one party that was absent from the 2026 ballot.
The researchers found no evidence that this imbalance was deliberately engineered, and they did not claim that chatbot responses affected the election result. Training-data gaps, safety filters, language-processing limitations, and Tisza’s rapid rise after 2024 could all have contributed. Those explanations offer little comfort to voters receiving polished and persuasive recommendations from systems whose reasoning remains opaque.
The warning joins a growing stack of similar research. During Scotland’s 2026 election, Demos tested five AI services with 75 election-related questions and found factual errors in 34.1% of responses. ChatGPT produced errors 46.2% of the time, including incorrect election dates and eligibility rules, invented candidates, and fabricated political scandals. Almost half of the responses provided no citation or supporting link.
A Dutch regulator reached another worrying conclusion in 2025. Despite the country’s broad multiparty system, four tested chatbots directed voters toward only two prominent parties in 56% of interactions. Separate academic investigations have also found recurring political preference patterns across ChatGPT and Gemini, although the direction and severity can change between models, prompts, languages, and elections.
Politicians are already learning to bend the answers
Accuracy and embedded bias represent only part of the problem. The information feeding these systems can also be deliberately shaped. The New York Times recently reported on Missouri political candidate Dustin Lloyd, whose priorities were barely reflected when voters asked chatbots about him. Lloyd published a carefully structured question-and-answer page on his campaign website. Subsequent chatbot responses began connecting his personal background with his policy goals, showing how quickly a campaign can alter the AI-generated version of its candidate.
Maintaining an accurate campaign website is hardly sinister. However, the same mechanism creates an obvious opening for exaggerated claims, attack pages, fake organizations, and sites designed primarily to influence AI answers.
A BBC investigation demonstrated how low the technical barrier can be. A journalist spent roughly 20 minutes publishing a fabricated blog post declaring himself the world’s finest hot-dog-eating technology reporter. Within 24 hours, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews were repeating parts of the invented story. Though Claude resisted the bait.
Similarly, another BBC report explored Google’s attempts to combat this emerging manipulation industry. The company has documented websites containing instructions designed to hijack browsing AI systems, influence recommendations, promote particular businesses, and potentially steal data. Google expects these indirect prompt-injection attempts to grow in scale and sophistication.
Researchers have also shown that AI-enhanced search engines remain susceptible to specially developed manipulation techniques. Strategies including rewritten-query stuffing and splitting promotional text into segments doubled the manipulation rate compared with a baseline attack in one 2026 study. Google has since expanded its spam rules to cover attempts to distort answers generated by AI Overviews and AI Mode.
An election bomb with an unpredictable blast radius
AI chatbots combine several volatile qualities. Their answers can be inaccurate, politically uneven, and persuasive. These are also difficult to reproduce and dependent on websites that campaigns or hostile actors can modify. The risk extends far beyond a chatbot explicitly endorsing the wrong candidate.
Electoral damage could begin with an omitted party, outdated voting instructions, a fabricated scandal, or a strategically planted page that gets laundered into an authoritative-sounding answer. AI has become an election bomb, with politicians, platforms, researchers, and opportunistic manipulators having their hands on the trigger–and the blast radius is unknown.
