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Election Workers Are Drowning in Records Requests. AI Chatbots Could Make It Worse

Experts worry that election deniers could weaponize chatbots to overwhelm and slow down local officials.

“Our county auditors came in and testified as to how much time having to respond to public records requests was taking,” says democratic state senator Patty Kederer, who cosponsored the legislation. When asked about whether they had put guardrails in place to keep their tools from being abused by election deniers, Caitline Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, said the company was “aware of the potential for abuse and [has] detections in place to help prevent bots from scraping our services to create and spread spam.” Roulston did not elaborate as to what those measures were, or why Copilot specifically generated a FOIA request asking about voter fraud in the 2020 elections. Kederer, the democratic representative, says that the threats to elections officials spurred state lawmakers to allocate more money for local auditors to “beef up security, if they feel they need to do that.”

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