Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

What happens when voters cede their ballots to AI agents?

Robotic hand holding a ballot
Alfieri/Getty Images

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. Starting this summer, he will serve as a Tarbell fellow.

With the supposed goal of diversifying the electorate and achieving more representative results, State Y introduces “VoteGPT.” This artificial intelligence agent studies your social media profiles, your tax returns and your streaming accounts to develop a “CivicU.” This artificial clone would use that information to serve as your democratic proxy.


When an election rolls around, State Y grants you the option of having your CivicU fill in the ballot on your behalf — there’s no need to study the issues, learn about the candidates or even pick up a pencil. Surely CivicU will vote in your best interest. In fact, it may even vote “better” than you would, based on its objective consideration of which candidates and ballot measures would improve your well-being.

In the first election with CivicU, there’s nearly 90 percent “voter” turnout with AI agents casting about a third of all votes. Soon after Election Day, a losing candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives challenges the constitutionality of votes cast by CivicU.

A robust legal debate ensues. State Y points to its constitutional authority to decide the manner of elections and notes the absence of any federal law banning AI agents in an electoral context. What’s more, State Y reviews historical records that make clear that proxy voting — appointing someone to vote on your behalf — was a relatively common practice in colonial America. The candidate counters that surely the Founders could not have anticipated and would not have tolerated a vote cast without active involvement by the voter in question. They also note that proxy voting, while permissible in some countries like the United Kingdom, has not been adopted by the United States. The developers of VoteGPT file an amicus brief arguing that a voter’s CivicU is indistinguishable from the voter — they are one and the same, so this is more akin to someone Googling how they should vote than someone delegating their voting power.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Who wins and why?

This may seem like an implausible scenario, but the rapid development of AI as well as its use in electoral contexts suggests otherwise. In fact, current trends indicate that AI will only come to play a larger role in whether and how people participate in democracy. In short, it is a matter of when and not if certain partisan interests will leverage AI agents to bolster the odds of their electoral success.

Though proponents of AI agents might claim such efforts reflect democratic ideals such as a more representative electorate, excessive use of such agents (like allowing them to cast votes on behalf of users) may actually cause the opposite result — decreasing the legitimacy of our elections and sowing distrust in our institutions.

Before CivicU or something like it becomes a reality, we need to proactively clarify what limits exist in the Constitution with respect to agentic voting. My own interpretation is that the Constitution prohibits the tallying of any vote not explicitly cast by a human. Though such a finding may seem obvious to some, it is important to stress that a human must always be “in the loop” when it comes to formal democratic activities. The development of any alternative norm — i.e. allowing AI agents to serve as our proxies in government affairs — promises to undermine our democratic autonomy and stability.

Read More

The American Schism in 2025: The New Cultural Revolution

A street vendor selling public domain Donald Trump paraphernalia and souvenirs. The souvenirs are located right across the street from the White House and taken on the afternoon of July 21, 2019 near Pennslyvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Getty Images, P_Wei

The American Schism in 2025: The New Cultural Revolution

A common point of bewilderment today among many of Trump’s “establishment” critics is the all too tepid response to Trump’s increasingly brazen shattering of democratic norms. True, he started this during his first term, but in his second, Trump seems to relish the weaponization of his presidency to go after his enemies and to brandish his corrupt dealings, all under the Trump banner (e.g. cyber currency, Mideast business dealings, the Boeing 747 gift from Qatar). Not only does Trump conduct himself with impunity but Fox News and other mainstream media outlets barely cover them at all. (And when left-leaning media do, the interest seems to wane quickly.)

Here may be the source of the puzzlement: the left intelligentsia continues to view and characterize MAGA as a political movement, without grasping its transcendence into a new dominant cultural order. MAGA rose as a counter-establishment partisan drive during Trump’s 2016 campaign and subsequent first administration; however, by the 2024 election, it became evident that MAGA was but the eye of a full-fledged cultural shift, in some ways akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Keep ReadingShow less
Should States Regulate AI?

Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, speaks at an AI conference on Capitol Hill with experts

Provided

Should States Regulate AI?

WASHINGTON —- As House Republicans voted Thursday to pass a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by states, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, and AI experts said the measure would be necessary to ensure US dominance in the industry.

“We want to make sure that AI continues to be led by the United States of America, and we want to make sure that our economy and our society realizes the potential benefits of AI deployment,” Obernolte said.

Keep ReadingShow less
The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The concept of AI hovering among the public.

Getty Images, J Studios

The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The AI race that warrants the lion’s share of our attention and resources is not the one with China. Both superpowers should stop hurriedly pursuing AI advances for the sake of “beating” the other. We’ve seen such a race before. Both participants lose. The real race is against an unacceptable status quo: declining lifespans, increasing income inequality, intensifying climate chaos, and destabilizing politics. That status quo will drag on, absent the sorts of drastic improvements AI can bring about. AI may not solve those problems but it may accelerate our ability to improve collective well-being. That’s a race worth winning.

Geopolitical races have long sapped the U.S. of realizing a better future sooner. The U.S. squandered scarce resources and diverted talented staff to close the alleged missile gap with the USSR. President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightfully noted, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He realized that every race comes at an immense cost. In this case, the country was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis

Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis.

Getty Images, MTStock Studio

AI Is Here. Our Laws Are Stuck in the Past.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a future once confined to science fiction: personalized medicine accounting for your specific condition, accelerated scientific discovery addressing the most difficult challenges, and reimagined public education designed around AI tutors suited to each student's learning style. We see glimpses of this potential on a daily basis. Yet, as AI capabilities surge forward at exponential speed, the laws and regulations meant to guide them remain anchored in the twentieth century (if not the nineteenth or eighteenth!). This isn't just inefficient; it's dangerously reckless.

For too long, our approach to governing new technologies, including AI, has been one of cautious incrementalism—trying to fit revolutionary tools into outdated frameworks. We debate how century-old privacy torts apply to vast AI training datasets, how liability rules designed for factory machines might cover autonomous systems, or how copyright law conceived for human authors handles AI-generated creations. We tinker around the edges, applying digital patches to analog laws.

Keep ReadingShow less