Sikora is a research assistant with the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy. Gorman is the alliance’s senior fellow and head of the technology and geopolitics team; Levine is the senior elections integrity fellow.
Days before New Hampshire’s presidential primary, up to 25,000 Granite State voters received a mysterious call from “President Joe Biden.” He urged Democrats not to vote in the primary because it “only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump.” But Biden never said this. The recording was a digital fabrication generated by artificial intelligence.
This robocall incident is the highest-profile example of how AI could be weaponized to both disrupt and undermine this year’s presidential election, but it is merely a glimpse of the challenges election officials will confront. Election workers must be well-equipped to counter AI threats to ensure the integrity of this year’s election — and our organization, the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, published a handbook to help them understand and defend against threats supercharged by AI.
Generative AI tools allow users to clone audio of anyone’s voice (saying nearly anything), produce photo-realistic images of anybody (doing nearly anything), and automate human-like writing without spelling errors or grammatical mistakes (in nearly any language). The widespread accessibility of these tools offers malign actors at home and abroad a new, low-cost weapon to launch sophisticated phishing attacks targeting election workers or to flood social media platforms with false or manipulated information that looks real. These tactics do not even need to be successful to sow discord; the mere perception that an attack occurred could cause widespread damage to Americans’ trust in the election.
These advancements come at a time when trust in U.S. elections is already alarmingly low. Less than half of Americans express substantial confidence that the votes in the 2024 presidential election will be counted accurately, with particular distrust among GOP voters. On top of that, election workers continue to face harassment, high-turnover, and onerous working environments often stemming from lies about election subterfuge. In an age of AI-driven manipulated information, the ability to readily fabricate images, audio and video to support election denialist narratives risks lending credence to — or at least creating further confusion around — such claims and inspiring real-world action that undermines elections.
What should election workers do to prepare for these threats? First, election officials need to incorporate AI risks into their election training and planning. Given election hazards old and new that AI can enable, it is necessary that election workers know the basics of what they are up against, can communicate to voters about AI challenges and are well-resourced to educate themselves further on these threats. To this end, election offices should consider forming a cybersecurity working group with AI expertise, adding AI-specific education to election worker training, and drafting talking points on AI. Likewise, simulating AI threats in mock elections or tabletop exercises could be invaluable in helping election officials plan responses to such threats.
Second, with hackers increasingly exploiting AI tools for cyberattacks, election officials have to double down on cybersecurity. Basic cybersecurity hygiene practices — such as enforcing user multi-factor authentication or using strong passwords like passphrases — can help protect against the vast majority of attacks. Unfortunately, however, many election jurisdictions are still well behind in implementing these simple protocols. Moreover, in the runup to the 2020 election, the FBI identified numerous fake election websites imitating federal and state elections sources using .com or .org domains. With generative AI increasingly able to produce realistic fake images and even web pages, .gov web addresses will become clear identifiers of authenticity and trust.
Finally, election officials should consider leveraging the responsible use of AI and other new technologies in their offices. Just as AI offers malign actors tools to undermine elections, the technology offers election officials instruments to ease operational burdens or even help them better defend our elections. Election offices can turn to generative AI to help with time-consuming tasks like drafting emails to prospective poll workers or populating spreadsheets with assignments. But before election workers rush to embrace AI technology, jurisdictions must create guidelines for their use, such as requiring robust human oversight. Likewise, election offices could consider piloting content provenance technologies that companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google are already adopting; these technologies can help voters discern whether content from election offices is authentic.
This year’s presidential race will no doubt be a pivotal election. The proliferation of accessible AI technology will both magnify and ease malign actors’ abilities to push false election narratives and breach electoral systems. It is vital that the United States fortify its elections against threats that AI exacerbates. This starts with ensuring that election workers on the frontlines of democracy are equipped to meet these challenges.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.